Many revolutionary thinkers succeeded by pursuing what they personally found beautiful and interesting, not by optimizing for consensus. This approach sometimes led them to reinvent existing work (like Einstein with statistical physics), but prepared them to extend human knowledge when they reached its frontiers.
Creating something truly new requires strong personal convictions that can withstand both self-doubt and the psychological safety of conformity. The development of authentic taste serves as both a creative compass and the courage needed to follow unexplored paths.
For any creative pursuit, the ability to notice more deeply is what distinguishes good from great. This specific pursuit of what feels beautiful gives rise to a form of attention that starts to reveal the infinite depth of the world. It surfaces nuances you hadn’t seen before even though nothing about your actual senses has changed. You begin to see wider and deeper.
We have built up an instinctive habit of looking things up and seeing how other people have done it before trying it for ourselves. But the downside is that this habit primes our brains to value our work in the context of the taste of others rather than of our own. We have outsourced our value systems for what is good and bad (how we may judge aesthetic value) to other people.
If we outsource our opinions all the time, we no longer exercise our own taste and lose the capacity to derive our own value systems. Like a muscle, it decays without frequent use and we default to liking and valuing what everyone around us already likes or does. As with anything mediating, the act of relying on the taste of society as a proxy for our own effectively serves as a band-pass filter, dampening the range of what our exploratory taste might consider.
A common thread to observe here is that a lot of early revolutionary thinkers didn’t worry themselves with what was ‘optimal’ or deemed right by consensus, but rather what was beautiful and interesting. This incidentally helped them to really lean into their taste as conviction.
At times, this led them to repeat work that had already been done (like Einstein reinventing parts of statistical physics or Grothendieck working out his own formal definitions for length). But by the time they did hit the bounds of human knowledge, it no longer mattered to them because they just kept doing what they were already doing: following their own taste for what was beautiful.
The societal pressure is to conform to what other people think and do; it is always a psychologically risky endeavor to do something new. Thus, any act of creation necessarily involves strong opinions about how the world should work — strong enough to survive the sharp edges of doubt and the false allure of safety in what is known and what has been done.
See also: Unfolding with Context,Yūgen