ARCHIVE: Ideas, Being, and Knowing

*** This entry was originally posted to LiveJournal June 17, 2010 ***


You are not your ideas. You have ideas about how the world works and should work--politically, spiritually, etc. They are your ideas. They are not you.

Moreover, no matter how convinced of your ideas you may be, chances are that you do not KNOW them to be true.

No, you don't.

No, really, you don't. For many of the kinds of Big Questions for which people enmesh themselves with their ideas, it is patently impossible for you, for me, or for any of us to KNOW that our ideas are true. You have an idea of which you may be quite thoroughly convinced (your preferred political party could solve a given problem better than the current party is solving it, you know what will happen when you die, etc.), but you do not and can not KNOW these things. Neither do or can I.

No, we don't.

So if another person disagrees with your ideas, unless that person's arguments are shoddily constructed--and admittedly, many are--that person is not attacking you. What's more, you and that person have differing ideas of which you may each be strongly convinced, but it is extremely likely that neither of you comes into the discussion KNOWING which of you is right and which of you is wrong. If either of you thinks he or she does, then you aren't having a discussion at all.

When people cling so tightly to their ideas that they take any disagreement with those ideas as an indictment of and an affront to the very cores of their beings, and when people think they KNOW that their ideas are right and that any differing ideas must automatically be wrong, debate becomes impossible. Without debate and genuine exchange of ideas, there is only chaos or balkanization or even violence.

So the next time someone tells you something that disagrees with your closely-held ideas--whether it's that the economic stimulus package was a horrible idea, or that the closest thing to a cohesive idea the Tea Party seems to have is "Roust the bums and be sure to call us 'regular Americans' as often as possible while you do it!" or that it is preposterous to believe that there is an invisible and all-powerful being who is omnipresent but who will send you somewhere apart from himself if you disobey him, or that bread and wine literally turn into actual human flesh and blood in your stomach, or whatever else it may be--please remember that the person is disagreeing with your ideas. The person is not attacking you, unless the person's argument is based on the ad hominem fallacy (that is, unless the person says something like, "Why should we listen to you? I remember you struggled with fourth grade social studies class, so you're obviously an idiot."), which would render the person's argument logically invalid anyway. You also don't KNOW that you're right and the other person is wrong, any more than the other person KNOWS he or she is right and you are wrong.

You are not your ideas, and you don't KNOW that your ideas are true.

No, you aren't, and no you don't.