About Maps and Territories

About Maps and Territories

A list of anything always includes “who” because we cannot get outside ourselves, as list makers. Though typically unseen, paintings nonetheless include their painters, the artists behind the artworks. The canvas is but a partial abstraction of the complete person who rendered it. An original creation minus a depiction of its creator.

The artist therefore signs their work in an effort to include him or herself in the finished piece. The signature is likewise prized in an effort, by others, to possess the wholeness. The painting, figuratively a map, is not the actual artist, of course, who is figuratively a territory--who is what the map represents. Nor is the completed canvas an entirety which would include the picture, the artist, the world, and the universe.

Mental maps drawn via our physical senses, our innate personalities, include observations and ideas about everything we experience. We must never mistake these maps (our opinions and beliefs) as being the actual territories themselves, as the true nature of realities we barely perceive at all. If and when we do, we fail to reckon the dire consequences wherein billions of separate individuals -- each in possession of their own maps -- are also free, the same as ourselves, to misinterpret and misconstrue the nature of the same world. To do so in manners that directly or indirectly conflict with our own maps, those of others, and subsequently result in chaotic situations where most everyone wanders alone, largely aimless, and utterly lost. A condition not altogether different from the current, worldwide state of affairs.

Noteworthy are the phenomena whereby groups of unimaginative mapmakers seek out or stumble upon those whose maps are vastly superior to their own. People who remain prone to map reading rather than making. Whereby we read the maps of others, adopt the maps of others, defend others’ maps, kill the heretics who refuse to accept the one and only map(s). Our inability to distinguish false maps, or purely invented maps that seduce but don’t enlighten.

The orderly, regimented life and the map that directs it.