The Need of Ridiculousness

To many times we writers let us to be assaulted by fear to do the ridiculous, and we do not publish our work because of that.

And not only writers, also scientists suffer from this illness. But hear we have that the possibility of falling in ridiculous , not only it has to be welcomed, but it is also necessary.

Thanks to the spontaneous generation theory -that seems today absurd and ridicule- the microscope had never be invented, because this artifact was made in order to prove or reject such theory. The theory not only was refuted but it was totally torn apart, on the other hand; the microscope would not exist without the spontaneous generation theory and that is for sure.

Also, in the Galileo times -who suffered by being put under house arrest, for the crime of telling that the Earth moves- everybody thought that the world was plain, that is why we call “planets” the body's that orbit stars, instead of calling them “rounded” or “spheroids”. In fact, the word “planet” means plain body.

If the big geniuses of mankind would have stopped in front of the possibility of make themselves ridiculous, we all would still be living in caves, or worst, we were slipping over the branches of trees; only think about the more than two thousand failure attempts of Tomas Alba Edison, trying to put light inside a bubble of glass, and how much he was derided in his time, continuously and systematically.

If Edison would give up under the society pressures of his time, we were not have electric bulbs, film projectors, nothing at all...

But of course, I do not mean with this that everyone should publish the first thing that they think; the knack consists of listening to our hearts, if it says to us to publish our work, then we must publish it, no matter how ridiculous it seems to us; we have to do it even in order to stimulate some body's disagreement; we never know, maybe the mentioned mister do invent something useful to make his point, something that will never be born if we were afraid of making a fool of ourselves.

So, ridiculousness not only is a thing that deserve to be applauded, because it cheers our lives with it witticisms, but it is also a necessity in order to achieve progress in all the fields of mankind knowledge.

The odyssey of thinking according to paradigms different than the ones already accepted by societies, is a hard path, but it is the only one that can drive us into progress.

(Felipe Antonio Santorelli)

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