Manifesto 02: Break logic. Make beauty.

Logic makes a great guideline, but not a great law

It’s an important tool for defending creative ideas in enterprise settings. That said, the main lesson I learned from reading Plato (a long time ago, one book, and he wrote 36) was that if you’re good enough at it, you can use logic to prove anything (see also the timeless 2+2=5).

Which is more true—realness or logic? You can have logic without realness and realness without logic. In art, realness has been circumventing logic for a long time. 

Also? Breaking logic is needed now more than ever.

Why now more than ever?

Because we are in a time of massive disorder, of questioning current states of order. I don’t think we will get through this with reason and logic. We need to be willing to have and create impossible, unreasonable, illogical things.

We need the deep, transcendent healing of beauty right now, and beauty is indifferent to logic. Sometimes it is found within the confines of logic, and sometimes outside of them. Beauty doesn’t care.

Beauty is bigger than tangible, or even perceivable, things. It exists in relationships, in moments, in your feelings, in your body. It emerges in those collaborative sweet spots when the stars align over a project—even a project as mundane as cooking a meal or designing an interface.

What exactly beauty is is the subject of much debate, which I’m happy to leave to others.

I happily consume and benefit from beauty that ignores reality, but the beauty that orbits my North Star acknowledges reality, and persists.