The spiritual commons, the shared pool of tropes and correspondences and roles that unite the minds of disparate people, is an extremely valuable resource. It keeps humans alive and sane.
Sometimes, for one reason or another, you can’t thrive in the commons. Sometimes you need to define yourself (or something else) in your own terms, which may not seem coherent or meaningful to anyone else. That’s OK. We can, and must, accommodate that. Thriving is important. And who knows? Maybe your private semiotics, or your category schemata, will turn out to be useful to people other than yourself.
I do a lot of that thing. Really, I’m not knocking it.
…but it doesn’t make you brave. It certainly doesn’t make you visionary. It makes you a defector. You are contributing to the destruction of a public good for private gain.
Is that the destruction of a public good?
We may have different images of what these redefinitions look like (we may be talking about two different things). But I think by the time your private semiotics and categories have a non-negligible impact on the commons, they’re not private anymore. They’ve been adopted by at least some public group of people beyond yourself who find them useful.
Hard to discuss this in very much depth without abandoning the pretense of #vagueblogging, but…
…at the very least, it’s destruction if you’re actively attempting to collapse the public semiotics because they make it harder for you to maintain your private semiotics. Which is, uh, a thing that we’re seeing a lot right now.