Aaltolainen Manifesti: Addendum
An International Outlook
At the end of the last article, I mentioned that an “international outlook” appears to be a value AYY tries to promote, yet the concept is not clear. Recently, I came across two examples that could add more context to the discussion, Mikhail Bakunin and Touko Laaksonen.
In both cases, the “overseas travel” was also a form of exile — Freud’s famous couch is not in Vienna but in London — and he did not take selfies on it. These people were not posing with a cocktail on some beach for social media. They had an international outlook, not because they were well-traveled, but because their stories have a few themes in common:
- Breaking out of one’s own parochial bubble
- Connecting with markets, friends and ideas beyond borders
- An outlook to bring change to one’s own homeland
What makes most people banal is the “Little Boxes syndrome”: wanting little more than having a slightly nicer car than one’s neighbour’s. Even young people are trying too hard to be “different” only to end up desperately unoriginal, to have everything meticulously and predictably constructed to conform to an image of the unique snowflake. The “outlook” is about having the humility to observe, to learn, to discover — rather than maintaining an image of status or coolness — to truly experience life one must be willing to learn new things and learn from the world and work on original ideas.
What is incredible — when you look at the story of how Tom of Finland was distributing prints, or how Maupassant described the gathering of friends (cf. similar sources, translated), or the scenes depicted by “Midnight in Paris”, or the Wikipedia page about Bakunin’s international activities, or accounts of how figures of millennia ago knew and met each other across great distances — is that people were able to become so unbelievably well-connected and find audiences and alliances in other lands, long before the age of technology!
What are we, now in these days, missing?
How can we become more meaningfully connected?
