Written by Dyami Millarson

The core values of our blog are originality, quality, empathy and humility. We demand from ourselves that our content be original. We seek to foster creativity and this is why we heavily discourage citation and translation. Paraphrasing and referencing, instead, are encouraged. When we wish to express the same ideas as in a previous article, we prefer to write an original article on the same topic, because that may lead to breakthroughs while we look at the same topic in a new way. Our strict rules for ourselves are conducive to maintaining a creative environment. Operation X started in the 1980s as an artistic name for the mission of an entrepreneurial organisation created and headed by my father A.K. Millarson, who designed hand-painted furniture and couture wedding clothes. My father’s work had received quite a bit of publicity before I was born and my father retired from the scene of public life as an eccentric designer-artist to raise me, philosophise about the meaning of human existence and the future of our society, and set himself to expressing these philosophical topics in his paintings, which were a drastic shift away from his earlier focus on designing exclusive furniture and wedding clothes, the philosophical foundations of his work have only been strengthened by him during the time he raised me because he has always been tirelessly interested in philosophy and expanding his ideas and seeking artistic solutions for the complex problems of the world we live in, such as mandkind’s estranged relationship with the local environment, nature as a whole and inborn instinct and the crisis of modernity brought about by relentless scientific and technological progress.

While Operation X started in the 1980s as an artistic-philosophical mission for changing the world – indeed creating an entirely new world or reality through a combination of art and philosophy – according to my father’s artistic-philosophical ideals which sought to strike a balance between a return to tradition and nature and modern technological and scientific development, the concept of Operation X has been inherited by me from my father and the current incarnation of Operation X is the direct and legitimate continuation of the old artistic-philosophical mission. My father’s involvement in Operation X continues and he will help to ensure that Operation X stays true to its original mission, which is important for the historical legitimacy of Operation X as a concept focused on improving the world by means of creating a new world or reality based on art, which takes inspiration from nature or intuition, history and modernity, and therefore may take inspiration from natural/intuitive, historical and modern shapes, philosophy, technology, science.

This article has not been finished yet. I am going to sleep now and I will share more about Operation X with you guys tomorrow!

These are the questions I may answer tomorrow and you guys may also pose some questions below if you have any about Operation X:

• What are the primal forms that influenced my father’s work?
• Why is world-building so vitally important in my father’s work?
  • What does it mean to save the world through art?
• How is the vision from the modern Operation X different from the old one?
• How did the philosophy of Operation X develop over the years since the ’80s?
  • The philosophy of Operation X developed independently and is based on “primal forms.” How does this natural philosophy, which developed gradually and intuitively and spontaneously, overlap with ancient philosophies such as Platonism and Confucianism?
    • How does the philosophy of Operation X differ from a cultural perspective: while Platonism was a unique product of Greek culture and Confucianism was a unique product of Chinese culture and were a message to the world based on these cultures, how is Operation X a unique product of Dutch and Frisian culture? And although the philosophical dialectics of Operation X is firmly based in the unique cultural dynamics of the Netherlands and Frisia, may the philosophy of Operation X also be seen as part of a wider Anglo-Frisian culture owing to English influence alongside the Frisian influence?
      • Culturally speaking my father and I feel most at home in Frisia, and that has definitely had a profound philosophical influence on the development of the philosophy of Operation X in the last decade. What happened in the last decade, and how did it influence the direction of Operation X? Why can Operation X not be understood without taking into account the Frisian cultural setting in which we have lived for the past ten years? How did Frisia change us forever and how did it alter the philosophy of Operation X as well?