STATEMENT
Enterprise / DAHNKE LLC
Motto / build the dream
Mission / To inspire a mass-cultural paradigm shift in values thus making way for the Aesthetic Era—an age that activates humanity to rise up to a supreme level of creative empowerment, individual autonomy, and collective harmony.
Vision / The Dahnke enterprise is designed to facilitate the empowerment of individuals to the realization of their creative potential and as a corollary, the creation of a culture that flourishes with beauty, innovation and uniqueness in all aspects of life. To act as the cornerstone in the manifestation of this vision, our seminal task is to construct and implement a solid and cogent systematic meta-ideology. One that instills a mentality that is positively-constructive in its nature and conducive to producing a steady stream of ceaseless creativity, individual autonomy and building the dream of an Aesthetic Era.
Upon careful reflection it is evident that the current status-quo ideologies propagated by the politics, religions and sciences of the present age to be fundamentally obsolete and thus volatile, stagnate and even degenerate towards fulfilling the aspirations of individuals and collective society alike. Disenfranchised by the failures of the dominant ideologies we’ve inherited by way of copycat-conformity, many seek meaning, purpose and faith in adopting foreign ideologies. Individuals often trade Christianity for Buddhism, spirituality for science, atheism for statism and so on, until alas, one falls dizzily confused in becoming encircled in a never ending carousel-of-misery.
While each of the popular ideologies promote themselves as more advanced, more true or more righteous than their predecessors and contemporaries, they are in all functionality, cut from the same mold differing only in name. At the heart of these fundamentally flawed schemes lies a commonly shared salient feature—a binary, diametrically opposed, scarcity-paradigm which constitutes the backbone of their foundation. This scarcity model sets one individual against another in a fierce, survival-based mode of competition over limited resources to pursue a limited set of goals in all facets of life.
The values that derive from this scarcity-paradigm prompt desires such as education from a limited number of elite schools, work at a limited number of prestigious jobs, and to make our homes on a limited lot of prime real estates. Choice in the scarcity-paradigm is reduced to a limited good vs. evil, true or false, win/lose, zero-sum dichotomy—that is, for some or one to win, someone, most usually everyone, has to lose. It seems that even in death there is no reprieve, for many are called, but few are chosen to enter the pearly gates of the so-called kingdom of heaven.
Fixated in this tunnel-visioned-tragedy one becomes backlogged, bottlenecked, stifled and stampeded by our like-minded one-track visionary peers. Hamstrung in one’s efforts, an individual’s energy is squandered, vitality exploited and hope depleted. Individuals deserve a break from the oppressive, authoritative and limiting systems of thought and a just reward for their laborious efforts. But with such narrow focus one loses sight of a greater vision, a new vision that awaits anyone contrarily bold enough to shun the masses and advance in a fundamentally new direction.
Albert Einstein, one of the greatest visionaries and creative minds known to mankind said, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved with the same level of thinking with which we created them.” This is wisdom, for the only way by which we are to overcome our obstacles and behold a new vision for the future is through a shift in the fundamental ideological-paradigm responsible for our values—a shift that gives us permission to turn our backs on scarcity and set our sights on the myriad of possibilities that lie elsewhere. Instead of spiraling downwards, being torn asunder, or caught in the vicious circle of stagnation propagated by the scarcity-struggle, we envision a shift upwards, to rise above the limits of scarcity and enter a realm of abundant surplus.
A surplus-oriented paradigm of thoughts and values invites us to see beyond the narrow eye of scarce objectives. Its mechanism of choice replaces a static dichotomy with a dynamic ever-evolving stratification of options. Its governance lifts the anchors of authoritarian external dictatorship so that individuals may freely organize and navigate by way of autonomous internal dictation. Instead of polarizing and paralyzing dead-end debates, the surplus-paradigm seeks solutions through a positive and constructive embodiment of seemingly oppositional truths that in turn produce an upward mobility for all.
A future world which operates predominantly based upon a surplus model of values relies heavily upon and seeks to advance the ubiquity of a significant instrument that is crucial to generating a surplus of actual value—that instrument is innovation. It is well understood that innovation is the driving force of progress, the spearhead of society that propels us forward into a future with less disease, more wealth and a higher general quality of life than previous generations. As an instrument that allows one to do more with less, society currently pours great support and effort into the more obvious, celebrated form of innovation known as technology—encouraging its necessary fields, the sciences and engineering.
But lost in our efforts is the often overlooked but tacitly obvious trait that is itself the driving force behind all forms of innovation—that force is creativity. The trait of creativity—the 21st century’s mysterious, undervalued and misdiagnosed contrarian child—is a trait desperately lacking amongst the scarcity-based ideologies and cultures. To remedy society’s defunct imaginations it is imperative that we now look to the arts and aesthetics—the avant garde of innovation itself—to assist us in modeling an ideology proficient at cultivating creative minds, innovation and a surplus of real value.
We envision a future era of aesthetic dominance, where creativity sheds its cloak of mystery and its attributes as a phenomenon accessible only to inspired artists or fortuitous innovators. We foresee creativity being known as a teachable and learnable process—a readily available skill commonly practiced by all. In an aesthetically empowered future innovation is no longer achieved accidentally in rare occurrence or manufactured due to favorable conditions created by the rare appearance of a conspicuous new frontier, but rather it becomes an actively willed process, and active innovation can only be inspired by the limitless frontiers of the active imagination.
When we look to the arts to inspire innovation, we don’t limit ourselves to just scientific, technological forms of progress but in following the lead of aesthetically-oriented endeavors we leave no territory untouched. We are invited to draw from the wellspring of creative innovation and apply its bounty to all aspects of life, in particular, living organisms. We envision opening a new dimension of techno-less innovation—innovations in the ways one thinks, walks, debates, nurtures, nourishes, etc. From this standpoint technological machines are mostly seen as secondary tools for expanding the abilities of our original technology—the human body.
If we are to truly take heed of and follow through to its ultimate conclusion, the technological innovators ideal aspiration to “do more with less”, then we can only envision a future where many of the machine based technologies are themselves rendered obsolete by innovating an adaptively-agile individual—a multi-platform creative individual who is master of their own mind and body and can readily, voluntarily adapt to a variety of conditions. To be sure, it will be immensely beneficial to use technology to quantify, understand and make that which is invisible, visible, but only later to “so to speak throw away the ladder, after one has climbed up on it.” (6.54)
In the Aesthetic future devices such as calculators are inconsequential as it becomes commonplace to possess savant-like mental abilities. The search for the cure for cancer is no longer pursued because innovations in preventative health make way for non-toxic nourishment, healthy body movement and a clean environment that together sufficiently negate cancerous growth and proliferation. Would we need to use energy to heat and cool our homes if one’s body temperature could be voluntarily self-regulated? And who has the need for lighting at night if we could possibly “see” in sonar? These examples are the kind of creative empowerment we seek to initiate and explore as humanity is elevated into the Aesthetic Era.
When the shift of our ideological foundations has taken place, the Aesthetic Era will serve as a testing ground for transcending the false boundaries of reality and human potential that has been imposed upon us by scarcity-based ideologies. We dare individuals to challenge the laws of nature, the limits of logic and the power of reason to exclusively dictate truth. Only in going beyond our most basic beliefs can we begin to truly dream, imagine and create in the medium of freedom.
Why limit our dreams to flying cars when we can have flying humans? Can the imagination comprehend the actuality of such a thing as a solar-powered person? And what of the hidden creations sealed away in obscurity beyond the current limitations of the human imagination—they too await emergence, beckoning us to unlock and manifest their magnificence.
A new time is being ushered in, the pendulum used to demarcate the ages of the past has swayed sideways for far too long and it’s back-and-forth beat has grown old and tired and is steadily slowing to a stall. It will soon find itself centered in stillness, oriented anew on a stable foundation with which it must leverage itself vertically, into the new era. As the pulse of the old becomes weak and faint, the bleak figure of a dying dichotomous ideology slowly fades to white and reveals a starkness out of which arises, a freshly primed, infinitely sized canvas for the aesthetic kingdom to build its dreams upon—may beauty reign supreme.
Jeremy Dahnke, 2016
