Ideas Have Consequences

We live in a world of ideas. Daily and hourly, we are bombarded with messages laced with ideas both overt and subtle. As a natural impetus towards finding purpose, meaning and fulfilment in life, every one of us must live by an idea one way or the other. But, therein lays the problem – how do we choose the right ideas? 

As individuals, whatever thoughts, philosophies, beliefs, opinions and notions we subscribe to determine what we think of ourselves, how we think about others, what we uphold as ideal and worthy of pursuit and what we discard as worthless or irrelevant.

The history of the world is essentially the history of ideas. The annals are awash with the history of many men and women who put their lives on the line because of the conviction they had in their ideas. We also know, through bitter experience, men and women who have gone as far as taking the lives of others because of what they believed. Were they wrong? Were they right? You decide. But whatever your verdict, one thing is clear, ideas have consequences.

After the Second World War, Richard Weaver wrote his seminal book “Ideas Have Consequences”; espousing unapologetically the primacy of ideas. It was, in a way, a reaction to the war and the utter destruction it had left in its wake. A strain had fallen on ethical principles and a sense of peace was badly sought. Weaver’s book encouraged a rigorous cause-and-effect analysis of our ideas and espoused the need for us to reflect on the ramifications of our beliefs on the world. Sadly, we have missed that part. We keep adding more –isms to our stock of belief systems without the faintest consideration what this world would become if these ideas came into full force.

Perhaps, Weaver’s book is somewhat to be blamed for my keen interest in philosophy- the other reason being largely Ravi Zacharias. In a recent reading, I found a logical connection between the philosophy of Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Superior Man and Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror. There are many such logical correlations that still wound our world today. In one of his dialogues, the sophist Callicles denounces morality as an invention of the weak to neutralize the strength of the strong.

“They (the weak) distribute praise and censure with a view to their own interests; they say that dishonesty is shameful and unjust meaning by dishonesty the desire to have more than their neighbors; for knowing their own inferiority, they would be only too glad to have equality. But if there were a man who had sufficient force (enter the Superman), he would shake off and break through and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws that sin against nature.”

“He who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost; but when they have grown to their greatest, he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them, and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. But the many cannot do this; and therefore they blame such persons, because they are ashamed of their own inability, which they desire to conceal; and hence they call intemperance base. They enslave the nobler natures, and they praise justice only because they are cowards.”

Imagine this stimulus pouring into the heart of someone of any considerable power. I will let you be the judge. The essence of this very piece is to awaken you to the fact that whatever you are exposed to be it a newspaper, billboard, sermon, commercial, novel, essay or music has an idea embedded in it. Would you please stop for a moment and consider the consequence of that idea before you let it in and pass it on to others?