Potential space

2002 was the first time I heard of potential space. The definition was, well still is I suppose, a place where people don't know how to act and the social rules we obey on a daily basis don't exist yet. We know how to act in a store, at a party, at work, in traffic or at a trainstation. In a potential space we don't. We sort of wander aimlessly and try to figure it out, and usually have a pretty good time doing so. A bit like in a warzone when the people came back to find their home to be something completely different. Perhaps that's a bad example but it's the one I have at hand at the present.

What if we were to thow out the past. Completely. All of it. As if the whole population suffered memory loss. There's be no memories and we wouldn't know each other. The whole universe would be potential space. There'd be no history. I haven't decided on the exact details I would like, but I'm assuming we can't speak or read either. We'd be corrupted by that.

If the whole human race would have to reinvent itself, how would the world be, with that second chance to set everything straight. I'm pretty sure we'd grunt a lot, communication is a human need. Perhaps we'd all starve to death. At least here in the dark north we would. There'd be no food in the winter so we'd lack the nessecary skills to feed ourselves. In the long run perhaps that wouldn't be that much of a loss. All the knowledge would be gone.

Would we go through the same growing pains as humans already have? Would the same areas be the dominant ones? Would religion even exist?

Or! Something that would be easier to use for an example to get my point across. What if all the books disappeared, except the ones dealing with science. there'd be no Poe, no Shakespeare, no Almqvist, no Dostovkeskij, no Dante, no Marklund, no anything. And first and foremost, there'd be no Bible, no Koran, no Torah. All the imaginative stories would be gone and we'd have to start from scratch in that department. Yes, I think I like this example better, in the first one we'd all probably just die. How depressing.

So, if we had no concept of religion whatsoever, would we invent it or would we just carry on our merry way dropping different sized balls from a tower to see if they fell at the same speed? Perhaps we'd all just be really coldhearted if we only had science.

But what I really wonder about are the concepts of things like common sense and beauty. They seem to rest firmly on something we call tradition, something I've touched in a previous post. Tradition, and values are created by people but if we had to recreate those, out of nothing, how would they be. How would we decide what's polite and what's rude and well, would we ever agree on it? Would we even have them?

Actually the whole idea makes me a bit uneasy as I pride myself in being polite, friendly and nice. I don't always succeed, but I try. Sometimes I tie myself in a knot and develop a terrible migraine and throw up a couple of times because it feels like I have some kind of devilish creature stuck half digested in my midregion, but that's besides the point. I still try to obey by the rules, the unspoken rules of society.

I figure it'd go something like this, first off we'd all be really selfish and take what we need, as a law isn't sience. Then some brainiac would say "hey chum, this isn't working" and we'd have laws. Someone would take a stick or something and start beating people up who didn't agree and to avoid pain we'd obey. Most of us anyway.

Then there'd be riots, because we'd all get to talking you see, noticing not everyone agrees. That would in extention lead to nations. By then everyone would be rather comfortable and feeling a little bit easier, they would have found people that were similar to them and that they could grunt with, hm, or maybe the would have developed speeach. Wait, did we speak in this example. If I didn't say so we would by now.

Then it's the whole aspect of love and such activities. I'm sure that in the beginning, where we enjoyed anarchy we would have gone where our whim was taking us but that doesn't work in a longliving society does it? We have to be able to trust people, depend on others to help us out. So for the sake of that let's say we hook up all couple like, but without the tradition of who we're supposed to be with. We would at least get to keep that freedom, for a while, surely it'd change over time when some smartass gets the idea to decide who we can love, how much and why, and let's not forget, in which manner.

By then it'd pretty much be like now. Perhaps we simply need these rules to not have anarchy. We need to feel opressed and shameful for everyone to get a piece of the action. But at the same time I doubt that the areas we concider successful would be the one that did the best, nor the people who did the best. Remember, we had no memory of feminism, racism, colonialism or any other -ism, those are all inventions of the human mind.

Hopefully we'd start creating stories anyway, maybe Borges was on to something about rewriting Don Quixote. Ok, time for me to confess my colour, what I really want said is that I think that somewhere in our windling brains there's an absolute idea, and the world around us is just a result of the electric sparks over time, so with the potential of potential space worldwide, seems I'm cynical enough to think we'd end up pretty much where we are. Just with a lot of unemployed priests.