Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal,…

Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a similar thing. It has huge implications, not least for Twitter. We’re ideas’ puppets. /1

If ideas were the property of humans, you couldn’t share the same idea amongst millions of people. It couldn’t become a ‘belief’ held by all of those millions, even at the same time. ‘My idea’ is a nonsensical statement, no person owns an idea. The ideas own us. /2

They exist before we’re born, and after we die. Why is it not seen that ideas have this independent existence? They must do, as otherwise they couldn’t be shared, nor could they live this eternal life separate to our own lives. Ideas, which we call beliefs, as if we own them. /3

Think about what beliefs you’ve had in your life, and how you’ve discarded some, adopted others, constantly. I like everybody else think back to some beliefs from my early life and cringe. But what I didn’t realise until much later, was that this was something else going on. /4

Ideas enslave us. We are their instrument. When we ‘change our minds’, it has nothing to do with our minds. It’s one set of ideas out-competing another in the battle to occupy us. I know it seems bizarre to say ideas have this independent existence, but again, if they didn’t…/5

…they couldn’t be shared between people, and nor could they survive for millennia. All of society is literally, physically, made of ideas. And all of history is the battle between different ideas. We’re their pawns. No behaviour, technology, cultural practice, no thought…/6

…or economy exists except as the manifestation of some idea. It can be startling when you realise this, it was for me. Watch yourself ranting about an idea, pause and physically feel how it has its claws in you. How that passion you feel can completely disappear over time,…/7

…showing that it wasn’t you driving that rant, it was the idea, and all that rescued you was another idea coming along and occupying you in its place. The objects in our lives, from the simplest brick to the most complex quantum computer, are all made with ideas. /8

They look ‘physical’, but it’s the ‘know-how’ that creates and sustains them. Why IP is such huge business. Society is quite literally ‘made from’ nothing but beliefs. Ideas. Competing ideas, eternal ideas. Creators and inventors are long dead when their ideas and beliefs…/9

…continue to circulate amongst others. And this is the absolutely critical role of education in our lives. Modern ‘economic’ societies have been left to believe that education is about training. About giving people ‘job-ready’ knowledge and skills. Just an (economic) idea,…/10

…enslaving us. Education’s role is to teach us to not be slaves to ideas, to be able to work with them in a nuanced and careful way. All ideas are dangerous, we have festivals of dangerous ideas, but the ideas talked about there are much less dangerous than ordinary…/11

…everyday ideas that are so taken for granted that we don’t even notice them manipulating us. True education doesn’t just dump ideas in our heads, that makes us even more dangerous than the ignorant, because a little knowledge just makes us more dogmatically accepting of…/12

…the ideas that enslave us. The uneducated at least have some degree of scepticism towards ideas. In my experience a poorly educated person is much more dangerous than an uneducated person, for this reason. And the number of truly educated people is dwindling fast, as…/13

…education succumbs to more and more job training, ideas simply transmitted to people with no capacity to process or question them. Often high specialisation assists with this, where we have highly educated specialists with no experience at all with other types of ideas. /14

What we call populism is like an endgame to this surrender to ideas. In the absence of true education to tame ideas, they get total dominion over us. People become literal acolytes to particular ideas, thousands of different fundamentalisms in conflict in society. /15

Twitter is such a great example. Watch the wars, every day. So easy to see these as battles between people. Really these are battles between competing ideas, using different human patsies as their mouthpieces. It can be incredibly liberating to reframe human debate this way. /16

Sit back and extract the ideas from these different debates, and see the battles as those ideas in conflict, with us humans as only the pawns typing the words. Ideas are absolutely critical, they’re the eternal part of our societies, this isn’t about getting rid of them. /17

But it takes so much of the sting and heat out of these debates when we consider ourselves as the puppet mouthpieces of ideas, using us. And again if you don’t believe this, remember the ideas you would have died in a ditch for 30 years ago, that seem ridiculous to you now. /end