Obsessed with Ideas
Why am I so obsessed with ideas? Are they just that interesting? Or is there more to it? Are ideas our thoughts? Or are our thoughts ideas? Or are they both the same thing — the interaction of electrical charges and chemical fluctuations in our central nervous system that we experience as thoughts or ideas? Maybe we can’t really know what they are. Maybe what they are doesn’t really matter.
Maybe what matters is what we do with them. Are our ideas the source or guide of our behaviors, our actions? Or are our behaviors and actions the source or guide of our ideas? Maybe a little of both? Could the dynamic be a feedback loop where one affects the other and the other affects the first one? Maybe none of that can be disentangled either.
Is it hard to make the case that our ideas and behaviors are not connected? Do we often choose to do something because we had an idea? Or do we often justify our actions with ideas after the fact? What we often call rationalization? That’s an idea too. Of course, behaviorists and cognitive psychologists may give different answers. Guess it depends on what they think?
How about an example?
We seem to have the idea that we (humans) are the only species that has this capacity to have complex ideas, as far as we know. But do we know? Is that even knowable? But do we act as though we are the only species that has the capacity to have complex ideas? Do we make decisions that affect not only other people but other species based on the assumption that because we have the capacity to entertain complex ideas that we are somehow superior and therefore worthy of making decisions without input from other species? Or without even considering how those decisions might affect those so-called lesser species? Seems like that may be all that we need to justify or rationalize a lot of our actions or decisions.
Does that prove the connection between ideas and actions? I don’t know. But intuitively, it feels that way.
The incredible and prolific poet, Kwame Alexander, once said “if you want to change the way people act, you need to change how they think. To change how they think, you need to change how they feel.”
Is he taking it even a level deeper? That our ideas are driven by how we feel? Is that the chain and direction of causation? Feelings drive thoughts which drive actions? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like there’s more than one answer to the these questions, pointing me in a crooked line. Does that feeling make me think that this is all so complicated? And what action should follow that thought about complexity?
Can we even tell the difference between a feeling and a thought? Are they two different kinds of the same thing? Two slightly different sets of the interaction of electrical charges and chemical fluctuations in our central nervous system, one that we experience as a feeling and one as a thought? Or, is the distinction merely semantic?
We may never know the answers to any of these questions. But I think we can all agree that, no matter what, ideas can be powerful. They have shaped the course of human history, and in recent years, planetary history. Should we be careful with what we do with them? Whether acting on them or using them to justify actions? Have our old tendencies toward individualistic thinking, dualistic thinking, hierarchical thinking, progressive thinking, and reductive thinking gotten us into all of this trouble? Do our ideas and beliefs have practical consequences?
Ideas have power. The also have staying power. They tend to stick around, like Ruth Handler told Barbie in the movie: people die, ideas last forever. Benazir Bhutto once said, "You can kill a man, but not an idea." See: maybe there are no new ideas.