I May Be Mentally Disordered

Monday, January 28, 2008

Ideas are viral

Ideas are viral. Good ones, bad ones, and the vast multitude of useless ones interspersed between, all have the potential to spread like influenza. A good idea can supplant centuries of bad ones, atomic energy, for example, and ultimately become a bad idea all its own. Sometimes bad ideas come good in time, Xerox giving away its GUI based operating system to Apple, who subsequently let Gill Gates and Microsoft have a look. For better or worse, Microsoft and Apple fueled the proliferation of personal computing, which made things like interweb access possible and navigating your computer via a GUI beats the living shit out of typing run, go, and change directory commands, believe me!

Ideas spread like diseases. I'm not the first to suggest it, not the first he think it, and certainly not the first to have the idea to write about it, but here I am, writing about it anyway. Going to the moon was an idea, just as entering ancient Greece through the pass at Thermopylae was an idea. The slave trade was an idea, just as all men being created equal was an idea. Ideas can be immensely powerful, even when their authors or credited orginators are intrinsically flawed.

When a slave owner writes, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", one is moved to wonder what the fuck is wrong with our species, but the author's failing of character do nothing to diminish the power of his ascribed ideas. In this way, ideas are bigger than their creators, often times becoming something more massive and potentially dangerous than the original authors might have ever imagined. Eugenics seemed like a grand idea to its creators. Little did they know that the Third Reich would use such ideas as the basis of their extermination agenda during World War II. Money, the only tangible god modern Man knows, is nothing more than an idea.

Ideas can expand our minds, and send a chill down our spines. Ideas compel us, direct us, and ultimately control us. In a very real way, our physical selves are nothing more than ideas we conjure within our active awareness from moment to moment. We are little more than internalized abstractions floating somewhere between who we think we are, who others think we are, and who we want to be. Natalie Portman's character Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta ponders the power of ideas thusly, "We are told to remember the idea, not the man. Because a man can fail. He can be caught. He can be killed and forgotten. I've witnessed firsthand the power of ideas. I've seen people kill in the name of them; and die defending them."

Unfortunately, I have no idea why I felt the need to write this little blurb about ideas, but I feel better having recorded it. I have an idea for a self-portrait in graphite that I am waiting for some reference to start, so I had a little time to burn.

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Now playing: Alice In Chains - Angry Chair
http://foxytunes.com/artist/alice+in+chains/track/angry+chair