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The Season Finale That Never Was: Creative Platypus

It all started with a whiteboard doodle during a brainstorm session in study hall. We were experimenting with pitches.  Suddenly, the room synergized and a story began rolling out with the force of a freight train. We had an idea -a great idea.

 How often do our thoughts come back to us with an alienated majesty? We discard them because they are our thoughts.

 Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance with my students this year, this passage struck me with the force of that freight train. Do I distrust my own thoughts simply because they are mine and not some paid authority? In a democratic nation, creators crave the votes of the masses; votes in the form of dollars. As the 51% (hoi poloi) become the arbiters of Right and Wrong, so the Paid Position tells us what is worthy (to agathon) and unworthy (to kakon) of our attention.

Plato taught that we do evil through lack of knowledge. No person would knowingly choose the bad since the bad would inevitably harm themselves in the end. Aristotle broke with the master by pointing out that we often do evil through weakness of will. In the same way, perhaps we do not always discard our thoughts because they are ours. Perhaps we also discard them because we lack the will, or the skill, or the power to carry them out.

So here we are. Bad Nun: a whiteboard doodle, a few sketches, and nothing more.

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