“Rules don’t make works of art. Works of art make rules.” — Claude Debussy
In a world where truth and intelligence are both being outsourced to AI, these are the smartest and truest words I have heard in a long time. I came across them watching a short video about Kurt Cobain, and how he was able to create such brilliant songs because (or some would say, despite) he refused to learn the rules of music and chords properly. He just played.
That is a beautiful truism, and it is lost in this age of rules, and silos, and specializations. We have gatekeepers on knowledge who are there to police us and keep us small. They remind us when we try to enter a room we are not supposed to be in. “Get out. You are not from the guild, so we cannot let you speak. We do not care about your ideas. We care about your affiliations.”
Kher, where it really matters, the gatekeepers’ track record is not convincing. Da Vinci carried the painters’ guild card, and his best ideas came from outside the guild: the anatomy, the engineering, the flight studies, work no guild existed to admit or approve. Al-Ghazali was the ultimate insider, holding the most prestigious chair in the Sunni world, and he quit it to write al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, indicting the scholarly establishment itself. The silo was not a space that genius wanted to enter. It was a room that genius exited.
Over time the guilds have become so strong that it takes a special kind of person to push against them and get into a space they do not want us in. Every being has a breath of genius in them. Then the genius is trained out of them to make them behave in a rules-based system. We need to raise a society that challenges the reality it is being sold. People who step into the room and ask about the stench of the corpse of dead ideas and thoughts that we peddle as fresh research.
We need the rule breakers: the artists who refuse to follow the rules that the gatekeepers have decided define and limit their art, the geniuses who cross silo walls and go wherever their ideas take them.
Because the guilds have finally built their perfect student. AI has memorized every rule of every art. It is the ultimate rules-based machine. It knows all the chords of tunes ever played and all the books that were published. But if rules made works of art, the machine would already be Debussy. It is not. The gatekeepers cannot explain that gap. Cobain could have.
“Our pale reason hides the infinite from us.” — Rimbaud
Be who you were meant to be before they told you who you should be.