When Vulnerability Is Aggressive
Another theme in Nik’s post on Curiosity and Vulnerability, is being curious about what lays hidden beneath, causing “resistance, obfuscation, evasion and even aggression.”
In an idle moment, my daughter Googled ‘Millennials are…’ The top adjectives linked to her search were: idiots, lazy, spoiled, entitled, useless.
It is belittlement on an industrial scale reflecting unchecked vulnerability. The narrative runs counter to a more hopeful truth. A White House report: 15 Economic Facts About Millennials, found Millennials “are a technologically connected, diverse, and tolerant generation. The[ir] priority on creativity and innovation augurs well for future economic growth, while their unprecedented enthusiasm for technology has the potential to bring change to traditional economic institutions as well as the labor market.”
Without curiosity, it is hard to stop the pungency of negative judgements seeping into our worldview and behaviour. The duty of the curious is to peek behind the sentiments to discover the sources of vulnerability that lay beneath.
Armed with understanding, it becomes possible to ask the producers and the normalizers of derision: “What is it that you really want and, when you get it, then what?” It takes us to the nub of conversations that must be had if new possibilities are to be made likely.
In the case of Millennials, it begs the question: what is the cost of subjugating their “creativity and innovation [which] augurs well for future economic growth”? Will today’s squelchers regret their sentiments when, in their dotage, they come to rely on this maligned generation? Millennials are but one example. Anti- sentiments lock out people and possibility; also it bolts the rest into a delusion of security amidst a sea of disruption.
Left unchecked, industrial scale aggressive vulnerability is pernicious, detrimental and shortsighted. The value of curiosity is that it has the power to peel off the blinkers of certainty; that necessarily produces a new kind of vulnerability until we adjust enough to make use of the opportunity. Finding ourselves “in a dark maze” (Bayo Akomolafe), we mustn’t miss seeing the importance of these intersections of vulnerabilities.
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