Are you feeling lucky, punk?

I have often pondered whilst creating music and teaching creativity, have we got it wrong?

Is it possible that from the age of Enlightenment onwards it’s been a race to the bottom, have we inadvertently thrown out important elements of thinking and attempt to be rational?

We are conceited, positioning ourselves above those from the past, and being superior to traditional people, because of our education.

We are born into countries that are modern and then away we are lucky, but have we lost something that people living in simpler times and in societies that we would look at as being rather backward have not?

I am not trying to sugar-coat what life is like in these communities or that we would be better off returning to those times or those ways of thinking but there truly seems to be something missing in our modern Western society. For me the evidence of this is the deep unhappiness that sits within people. There is a definite chasm that has opened up in the people who live in the United Kingdom because of political allegiances and possibly this is true in America with the people pro Trump and anti-Trump. But the evidence is also found in the high levels of depression and suicide amongst the young. Where is the love for life? It seems to have been replaced by a feeling of angst, whether this is due to pressure within the education system to achieve such an early age, our loss of spiritual identity due to modernity which might explain the rise of paganism both here and the US or whether there is a feeling of hopelessness that to get on your gonna be saddled with so much debt that you would never be able to afford your own home, this is a shocking indictment and shows the farce of progress.

So can we bring back some of these elements that we have thrown out with the bathwater? Can we believe again in luck and what’s more can we start to tip probability in our favour by believing in it? Dr Wiseman wrote a book about being lucky, in this book entitled The Luck Factor. Richard Wiseman conducts experiments on people who consider themselves lucky and those who consider themselves unlucky and he finds evidence that the belief enables the lucky people to find things that the unlucky people do not.

The anthropologist Eduardo Kohn who studied magical practices within traditional societies said that there is more than more instances of magical events within traditional societies who believe in magic than in those who do not. To the rational mind that sounds like people deceiving themselves. But are we beginning to see that the rational mind is actually deceiving us?  because what it isn’t allowing us to be aware of is that the unconscious moves in peculiar ways, chance happenings chance meetings that fulfil ideas that are in your head, none of these are logical and many of these statistically improbable but they happen.

Now I spent many years writing and teaching people to become successful musicians and if you look at the statistical probability of these people succeeding it is virtually zero the numbers of bands that exist chasing after success, and these people need an irrational belief that they will succeed in order to survive and gain any form of success.

So let’s put luck back on the agenda and let’s start viewing things optimistically in order to at least have a chance to succeed. Maybe that belief in luck might increase your chances of things that are probabilistic I like somebody’s definition of probability and possibility, ‘there is a rich man in a car, it is possible for him to get out of the car and dodge traffic and come over to you and give you £1000 but he probably will not’, unless you increase the probability that he might, maybe this is where luck comes in.

So the question is, ‘Are you feeling lucky, punk?’

Vic

Come to blues camp running this year in July in the lovely Tonbridge School in Kent visit www.bluescampUK.co.uk for full details

See you there