Where Should Creatives Live?

 This episode of the Gifted Creative Podcast delves deeply into Aesop's fable of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse. It unpacks the metaphorical significance of the story, interpreting the city mouse as individuals who live in perpetual stimulation and under control, while the country mouse represents creatives who thrive in slower natural environments that offer freedom and simplicity. It questions the design of urban environments, much like the city mouse's luxurious but perilous surroundings. The podcast reviews historical manipulation of societal values to favor urban living, that suppress holistic creative intelligence. The podcast covers how cities rise and fall. Finally it examines where not to live for those who want to develop their full scope of creative intelligence. 

Transcript

 Hello everyone. Welcome to the Gifted Creative Podcast. I'm Lillian Skinner.  If you've listened to me before, you'll notice I changed my podcast name. It is now about creative intelligence.  What would prompt me to change my podcast  name?

I am sure you can guess. There are many, many reasons, but I actually always intended to do this. I knew that I was going to be transitioning from Neurodivergence to creativity because I don't see a difference between the two. And I also gave myself the title of Creative Intelligence researcher five years ago when I started doing that.

So yes,  I expected to make this change and it has aligned with what I expected in the world. We now need creative intelligence more than ever, and I'm not really sure people even know what it is. Because Cartesian dualism pretty much erased it. As a researcher. For the last five years I've been working on how that happened and also to understand how creative intelligence fits into the future.

I used to work in emerging tech, I did IT security, risk management, and I kept seeing my intelligence laid down in the hardware and software I was working with, and I found that fascinating. So I tried to go into cognitive science and social sciences where I was pretty much thrown out immediately because they're not interested in people who don't believe in cartesian dualism.  

Surprise, surprise. And I knew that I had to go in this direction because it would never reach Singularity because the creatives had it. And creatives are not able to put down their full intelligence to a machine. That's just not possible. But that's exactly what they expect us to do.

So I pivoted to this.

I grew up in a family that is about as creative as we can get. We are savants and I think many more creatives are savants than they realize because our 2D systems oppress what savant is quite profoundly. Most people in this world don't see whole picture creatives do. Most people only   see and can articulate the small picture.

Some can feel the large picture, the other half, but very few are capable of seeing, feeling and articulating the whole picture. Because we are only cultivated in cognitive intelligence in our systems.   That's how we can replace it with ai because we have been limited to that.

But that doesn't mean we don't have that greater intelligence. And I could try to reach everyone with this, but  I  will fail.  I  think that. Most people are so far away from their native  holistic intelligence that they're not gonna understand what I'm saying. And in past history, those people have been persecuted.

So I'm just reaching out to those closest to me because they are the ones who are gonna be interested in this. We don't have a choice but to go this way. If we try to go the other way, it nearly kills us, or it does. That limitation is there because we are only focusing on the small picture. Our systems don't value people who are integrated in  somatic and cognitive intelligence. Which means they don't get a place in our system.  We have to slot into what they have valued and what they have valued is only small picture, and it's not actually creation, it's dissection, it's destruction, it's deviation, it's anything they can to make it smaller and divide it, which isn't true growth.

And now we actually need real, authentic growth and  to  stop focusing on division and dissection. Because our systems don't value people with somatic and cognitive  integration. We don't have a place, so my family has struggled because of that. We are meant to do something very specific. My father's a music savant, but he ended up being a paramedic.

My sister's a music savant, but she ended up being a poet. I'm an emotion savant and I ended up working in technology.  And I had aunts and uncles and grandparents that all ended up in a space that was completely the opposite of what their talent was naturally in. I think many creatives know this. It's like we are kind of beyond what  the   system  talent is for the space, and so we can't actually go into it, which is horrible. It's a shame.

And we right now need genius and  they have a system that limits that The creatives keep their internal modeling, and our system doesn't allow that. It won't allow us to use that. It keeps us externalizing everything. But I know how it works. And this is the research I am sharing on this podcast  and  in  real life with the people I work with.

I know they would really like me to lay it down in ai. But I'm confused why I would do that. That would be replacing myself with a machine, and that would just be stupid. Also, I don't think it's actually possible. I think the most reasonable thing,  probably the only thing we can  and should  do is actually use AI to enhance our intelligence.

Not diminish it. Not replace it, but enhance it.

Almost all the science on our creative intelligence is for those who have been fractured, who have split their intelligence apart, those who are not really truly creative. We don't have creative intelligence science because of Cartesian dualism, because they split our intelligence somatic from cognitive.

But creative intelligence is  born when you merge the two. When your emotions work for you. You'll notice in our science, there's little parts and pieces of this. The neuroscience is definitely contributing to  That picture now. Yeah, there's no one that's making it whole. No one that's making it make sense.

So I've decided to be that person because my intelligence lays in this space.  It goes across the whole, and I know what it looks like. I've already laid down taxonomies for how we learn, think and grow, and are somatic and are creative intelligence  that  align  with  the ones  that  are  already laid out for cognitive.

I have  re written much of the science on how creatives move through the world because creatives are different.

You will notice I use a lot of story in this podcast because story is important. Story is holistic.

Story allows me to tell you how the past and the present and the future come together. So I'll use story on a lot of these podcasts,  in addition to doing some interviews,

So let's get to our story. It's a story written by Aesop. Also many times Seen, heard as one of Aesop's Fables. Aesop was a slave in a collapsing empire. He was owned by the people he's warning you against in this particular story. And for 2,500 years, this fable has survived because it encoded something really. Important, but that's hidden in plain sight.

We know the story as the city mouse and the country mouse.   History has mutilated the story to its simplicity, but I have read so many versions that. I think I put them all together  until  this  is how I saw it.

A city mouse went to visit his cousin in the country. When he arrived, he shared a meal with his cousin and was pretty unimpressed by the plain foods, the grains, roots, and dried berries. He walked the land and was pretty bored  by  the scenery and how little was  happening. The city mouse asked his cousin, why do you live here?  Why would you live such a hard, quiet, lonely life? Don't you want more.

The country mouse thought, I don't know. This seems fine to me.

The city mouse said,   no there's so much better in the city. There's more food. There's more happening.  It's so much better. The country mouse was curious.

So   They traveled back  to  the  city together. When they arrived, the country mouse was overwhelmed at first.  But  once   in  a  grand house  he saw  a table of cheese, cakes, fruits, and fine meats, and he was all in. He was amazed.   Just as they were about to feast, they heard a loud noise. The door burst open a cook and a dog rushed in, and the mice had to run for their lives.

When they reached safety, the country mouse said, I think I'm gonna go home. I've had enough. You might have luxuries here, but I have  a simple life without fear, and he returned home, ate his food, and lived a long life.

In this story, you could say the city mouse are the people who live in the cities, and that's obvious. But the country mouse is actually the person who is creative, who is whole, who has  maintained  his  full  cognitive architecture because living in cities is like living in low grade trauma.

The only people who do  ok  in  POW camps  are  psychopaths. They  don't do poorly in them.  Psychopaths   do  ok  in  them because they  need  outside pressure or outside structure.

Whereas creatives, they need the opposite of that. They need   freedom so that they can see the whole and then create for it.  It's really hard to do that when you are under the control, structure  or   schedule of others.   .

  ...aesop   was   property. He was owned by someone like the city mouse in the center of power. He couldn't write the city  is  run  by psychopaths to extract everything from the countryside and call it civilization. He couldn't say that because he would've been executed before the Ink dried.

So he wrote about mice.

For 2,500 years his warning survived every empire that tried to bury  it,  because  here's what he was really saying. Cities are predators disguised as progress. The feast is bait. The trap is real.  And once you're in, the system is designed to make you never able to leave. When you strip away the metaphor, the pattern becomes clear. The country mouse lives simply, but sovereignly and the city mouse  lives  in  luxury, but as prey.

The country mouse experiences both the seduction and danger of the extraction system.

The  country mouse says, I'm not doing that.   He walks away from the illusion of abundance to reclaim actual freedom because there isn't abundance in the city. In truth.  It's shallow, it's minimal, and you're gonna always be paying for it.

The coercion is what the country  mouse  sees through.

He  was told his life wasn't good enough. We all know this  because it's our lives surrounded by all the media   pushing   advertising .

Aesop was encoding a fundamental truth. If you have peace, do not give it up. It's okay to not want what everyone else does.

When we look deeper into this story, we notice something else. We notice the environments reshape our brains. The city mouse in the country was bored because his brain is racing. He's used to constant stimulation. He lives in a hypervigilant state where stillness  feels threatening  like there's something wrong. There's something off. . When he got to a place of safety, not only did he not recognize it, he didn't enjoy it, he didn't value it. He wanted to leave.

That's what we call A DHD  in the city mouse brain, when it  encounters,  quiet environments the nervous system, which is so used to being hyped up, stimulus dependent, needs input constantly. It feels disoriented   and bored.

The country mouse though he would get labeled as autism if he moved to the city because he's overwhelmed by the city chaos. He has his holistic intelligence. He maintains his pattern recognition and sensory sensitivity, and he can tie those two together. Neither are disorders. There are adaptive responses to environmental demands that have become pathologized because our cities want to control  who is special and who is not.

The real pathology  are  the  urban environments that systematically disrupts our natural neurological development. It is the environments that are the pathology, creating generations whose nervous system can't function without artificial stimulation or shut down when overstimulated.

It is the forcing of us to  our stamina in our education systems, and then reinforced by that in our cities that we see this. We are  going to school to be funneled to the cities.

The 2D education system creates the environment  closer to  a  city in the classroom, and that is what the result is. You get labeled if you are not able to Perform normal in an un-normal  environment. 

When I was growing up,  my  great  grandparents used to say, don't go to the city. The city's where the psychopaths live. Which I thought was funny at the time, but now I understand the context. The cities are where the psychopaths live. Because  that 2D system, that pathology is what psychopaths live in.

That's how their brains work. They need higher stimulation,  they don't feel their body, so they don't care if they have to sit in a seat.   Basically  they  created  the ideal environment where they will rise to the top and everyone else will struggle,  in the cities and  our education system.

Why would they do that?

Well, there's a couple reasons. One, psychopaths don't   do well in natural human environments.  They also can't create. So when you cannot create, you need people to create for you. And essentially they've set up a giant Ponzi scheme so they can get people to create for them and built an environment that they do like, and that is the cities.

Psychopaths  can't move out of the city. They lack the sensory intelligence. They lack access to their somatic intelligence, so they have to stay in the city because the city's the only place where  they  can function .

 Before  the  1940s. Everybody knew that the city was full of  predators who concentrated power.  . It was in the countryside where people still got to live whole human lives where they had good relationships with their families.

At first State colleges were built out in the country. They were built out far from urban centers.    There were still plenty of small towns that have   excellent colleges built around them because this  kept them safer from the corruption.

But in the forties, after a coordinated campaign of rewriting the story of where intelligence existed lived and what it was, suddenly smart people lived in the cities. Suddenly, the cities   are education centers. Rural populations were  deemed backwards. University culture deliberately concentrated to urban  cities.  They moved whole university systems to the cities.

that   rewrote  this  history within one generation. Everybody was convinced that the place their ancestors had warned them about. Was  the only place worth  living  at.

. Elsewhere in the world. We knew that the cities were not healthy.  By the Victorian era, the symptoms of cities were undeniable. Entire populations we're developing. What today we see as chronic fatigue syndrome, pots, anxiety disorders, autoimmune  collapse.

And what did the medical establishment do? They said, go take a holiday, go to the beach, go to the country. They knew that nature was where you could reset your nervous system, where you could find your immune health. They couldn't admit the cities were unhealthy, that they were not natural, that they were bad for people's health, so they recommended a rest in the country.

Okay.

To convince people to go to the city. They  needed the creatives.  Because the creatives are  the ones  who  make the city interesting.   once They  had the rural areas, starved of any sort of real creativity, starved of anything that wasn't binary, bland, normal, 1950s, they  put  the  indie  places in the city.  Places that drew out   creative   people from the suburbs and the rural areas to the cities.   Cities  commodified rebellion.  Rebellion that they created by making you  a  scapegoat at home. 

the  2D system, the Prussian education system, which was the model  they used,  did   the same  with the  Polish children. They broke them apart from their culture, their families, and  , they   got them to  serve  Prussia.

While the change for the creatives was obviously the fastest with the 2D system because they turned all the creatives into the learning different or learning disabled or struggling, and they made them the scapegoats. For the rest of the group. The process was  slower. It was  much slower because when I was going to school, even in the nineties,  I  had economics. I took a sewing class, I took a shop class. We still had some of those classes. But they replaced those classes with screen-based learning college or bust pressure.   In the nineties, nobody wanted to get their two year  community college degree because  that meant you had to stay home.

My teachers were very clear on who should go to college and who shouldn't. If you went to college, it meant you were leaving. You were probably never gonna come back to the town I grew up in. If you stayed, it meant you went to community college and they acted like that was less than, but you were the one that was staying.   That seemed like a really bad way of dealing with it. But that was how it worked.

If you ever watch the movie Grease, they used to   work on cars in high school.  I  know schools  in  Mexico  who  teach the 4 year  degree with a two year degree because it embodies it.  Not here in the States. Heck no. We do not embody anything. We do everything we can to do the opposite of embodying it.  God forbid anybody actually truly knows something deeply.  It's all shallow surface because that way you have fewer choices. You're locked into whatever you go into and slot in the system.  College system is  2D and  comes with  debt attached to it.

That's the reason they funnel you into that.

The creatives, they're the only ones who can still make things.   We get funneled into tech. Tech meant we weren't getting to  be  the typical  creative, but if we lived in the city, then we could  hang around with creatives. 

I did move to cities because of that.  But ultimately I couldn't stay in cities.  They were breaking me  physically.   2D  school was torture, and the way I felt living in cities was torture.    with  each generation school is becoming more restrictive, more controlling, there's less  creative  outlets , and they just keep handing out more labels instead of fixing education. 

I  know the educators are not necessarily at fault for this. It's the administrators. But let's face it, our education system  is  one of  the worst  in the world, and we pay the most per student. Obviously.  It's not  educating, it's just  conditioning. 

Children are shooting it up.  That should be an indicator, but   we've all been conditioned in it to not question authority.  Most have lost  our  top  down thinking.  Without  our  top down thinking, we can't even see  across domains and  connect things together.

I still have my top down thinking.  for that  I was told as a kid was, what is wrong with you?

Why are you like this? Who do you think you are? Like, I needed to know my class level.  I was aware of my class level.  But  they said this  because I could see across boundaries.

most importantly, the 2D system  separated  students  from  their ability to know what they actually wanted.  the 2D  replaced internal guidance and your whole intelligence coming together with external pressure to break you  to  perform for the outside.  Keeping you  Always focused on the outside.

This is how empires assimilate periphery. Cities are not where we create. They're where they extract creation. They produce nothing and consume everything.

The feast in the city mouse's story wasn't about cheese. It was about the surplus extracted from the countryside.   In cities, they're pulling in the very best of the countryside, so the countryside doesn't   get their own best. Cities concentrate wealth and power until the Ponzi schemes collapse.

They bring people in the bottom and say, you get to move up. If you are good enough and smart enough and special enough, you get to move up. But most people never  do.  Most never have a chance. The infrastructure isn't built for flow and continuity. Built for dependence and oppression.

When the extraction stops, cities become death trap.  The people are held there by artificial scarcity, rising costs, and the fact that they've been educated out of knowing how to create.  The cities are the least safe place  masquerading as the only safe place for outliers.

Most creatives lose everything there.   The bodies of creatives need authenticity.  they  Can't live in the fake.  This is our body's intelligence trying to protect us.  

When we live  in our full pattern recognition, where there's space for us to breathe and think and be, we can see what's coming and get in front of it.

The country mouse knew what he had to do. It was very clear. He knew  quickly  because  his  body said, you don't need this. This will kill you. This is not good for you.

They tell us our whole lives. We do not know ourselves. We cannot trust ourselves. We do not know what is best for us. How can that be? 

It can be because most people have lost that ability. Most people have been stripped of their full somatic intelligence. I only recently found out that I have my full somatic intelligence. I only recently found out that other people don't even know what they want or what's good for them.  That was astonishing for me to figure out   that's  what the difference between multidimensional intelligence was.

I still had my full somatic intelligence. It  is  clear about  what's going on, and yet we pathologize all of that because this system is about extracting that away.  The problem  is when you have it, you can create. And so the system is destroying those who can create while also needing them more than ever.

They don't even know what they want. It's just about control because that's how it works. When you're 2D, you can't see the whole picture. You become  myopic in your focus and you only know how to control. So the more things get worse, the more they control and the less they can see on how to cultivate or help anyone.

Creatives   know exactly what we need. We know this because if we do not know ourselves, we cannot create. We have to know our whole world. We have to know ourselves inside and out in order to create.

The story reveals there was never a choice to make.  2D systems, 2D cities,  are places of death, dissection and destruction. They're not creating, they're dissecting. They're just taking things that were once alive and breaking them up and calling  them  new  things.   

 , in order to make a city, they had to scapegoat the creatives in their own families and their own cities or towns and villages to get them  to  move to the bigger cities. And when they got there, all they were offered was each other, which is what they should have gotten in their hometowns.

Now the cities are going to collapse. The surfaces are gonna falter. Supply chains are gonna break. Institutions are already losing credibility. The crime rates are gonna rise.  The middle class and the wealthy class always leave first. A lot of wealthy have extra homes.

They can go in and out as they need to.     with COVID, we  had a dry run of people who could leave. It's going to continue to happen as we have a rapid decline.  This is a tipping point essentially, of the cities. Because the cities aren't real. They're not true creative places. You have to have everything shipped in, and so as soon as things break down, they break down and everyone who can leaves.

What happens when they leave though, is emergency services get shut off. Hospitals become non-functional. Gangs of militia form and take over micro areas, mass  evacuations can happen.  They  becomes survival zones in urban ghost areas. Those who stay behind are usually old ,  poor or very young.

People are scavenging, buildings get abandoned. They really look like wastelands.  They are  really gonna look like what the movies say. The city becomes in inhabitable once they have no clean water. It gets uncontrolled disease. Nobody really wants to be in the cities, and I'm saying this because I know young people moving into the cities right now.

Collapse  is a  horrifying  thing. But the creatives are ones who can always leave. We built it. We made most of the things that are interesting there, so wherever we go, we can do that  Again.

We don't really need much.   We just need other people who are like us. Other people who have high compassionate empathy, who use that to create. Because our empathy is  what  brings our two intelligence together are big picture and are small. Our head and our body are cognitive and are somatic to make   creative intelligence.

We have already seen examples  of city collapse in   Katrina, COVID, Detroit's economic collapse, and then Rome, which is where the story came from. If we can get away and create our own places in the country, we can make a place where we're not persecuted, where we're not seen as less than, we're not being destroyed because we are able to learn through our whole intelligence.

This is a very old story with the deep meaning, even though it's one of the shortest stories out there,.   We have to be conscious of these old stories. They have a lot of value for us because we're going into an era where our system doesn't have anything that they can give us because they haven't. Kept that information. They don't tell you that things go wrong in 2D systems. They  rolled  this  2D system around the whole globe and it's  crashed everywhere. And it will crash here.

These ancient stories are here for reference. They aren't just meant for children. They're meant to help everyone maintain their holistic intelligence and their creativity and understand the value of them for all times. Creatives do not struggle as profoundly as other people. When they say the meek, and here at the earth, it was translated from the sensitive.

But the sensitive and the creative are one and the same. Because the sensitives are the one who  keep  multidimensional intelligence. They  keep  the   ability to maintain the connection between their intelligences. We're all gonna have to create now.  We will not have the same level of resources that we've had because  the ecology  is crashing .

There's  not gonna be an abundance like there was. We had a false scarcity where some had abundance, but now it's gonna be, no one has abundance and that's okay because creating. Gets through that creating allows us to get through that. Creating allows us to move past that.

Creating allows us to figure out how to make things without needing the resources that we may have used in the past. Creatives are good at taking small and making more, making big. This is what we do that the rest of the system didn't guess we can do. The dissecting and seeing the big picture  we're fine at that too, but we're really meant to create, that's how.

All of the things they said that we were disabled at   truly came down to the fact that we weren't doing what we were supposed to do and which is creating. So scarcity is not as scary for the creatives. This is how we've been able to stay at the bottom of the hierarchy, the least respected, the least valued for a hundred years here in 12,000 years in other cultures.

So there is a little silver creative lining around collapse.

Thank you for listening. I hope this was valuable. Take care. 

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