Something ancient societies knew but which we’ve forgotten is that ideas have agency. They’re never our ideas…

Something ancient societies knew but which we’ve forgotten is that ideas have agency. They’re never our ideas or opinions, they have an independent existence that crosses millennia. All ideas are dangerous ideas, they need to be tamed. Universities have that as their key role. /1

It’s no coincidence that the same people who set up and fund think tanks to flood our public discussions every day with new slogans and ideas, also gut universities of funding. They know the true source of power in society. It’s not wealth. It’s ideas. /2

Churches know this, they have a genuinely magnificent understanding of how to work with ideas, how to persuade. But even they fall victim to ideas themselves, such as in the Reformation. Ideas are the true, active, eternal beings throughout history. Plato said it. /3

Step back from the daily conversational wars and reframe them in your mind’s eye as competing ideas, battling each other. That’s what you’re actually seeing, people are just the current soldiers different ideas co-opt. /4

It takes enormous discipline to tame ideas, to not be seduced and enslaved by them. They’re not ‘our opinions’, again if we could own an idea, how could others share them? How could they reappear throughout centuries of history? /5

The pandemic is the outcome of libertarian political ideas. Beating the pandemic is about understanding and targeting those ideas. But it takes decades, even generations, to shift ideas. The libertarians have been working hard to shift beliefs for 70 years. /6

It’s too late to turn that shift around, during this pandemic. We’re observers of our fates at this point. It’s not conservatives or socialists or Left or Right in play here, they’re just the ideas’ current foot soldiers. All we can do is just chip away at these beliefs. /end