Good and bad ideas

I believe that ideas are the most powerful human creation.  That is my reason for creating the national public radio program Social Thought.  Social Thought is about the way all institutions are built on ideas (metaphors and images).  It is also my reason for focusing my life on generating reliable testable ideas.

There are also such things as good ideas and bad ideas.  The notion of good and bad ideas rests on a primary hypothesis of mine: there is a real world; while we live in a human created world, there is an overlap of the created world on a real world.  In our created world we are blind to the real world.  Of course we can never escape our created world and can never know the real world for certain (Pragmatism of the Charles Sanders Peirce sort).  Think of a desert with objects on it and terrain.  We are blind people walking on that desert. When our ideas are based on moving forward on a flat surface (in our imagined world), we will find our ideas turn out to be painful when we encounter a real rock.  Similarly when our ideas run us into a solid pillar (in the real world) we might be seriously hurt of die.  In such cases our ideas are bad ideas, because they are punished by our interaction with the real world.

There are also good ideas, the equivalent of a slight down hill slope for our walking as seen in the real world.

I see people who are living with a large number of bad ideas and their lives seem heavily burdened with miscarriages and disasters. In a few instances I see people with good ideas who seem to lead charmed lives.  Most of the time, the real world does not intrude on our socially created worlds.

Just last week we saw a wonderful example of the real world disrupting the life of a person with a bad idea.

President Obama and most of his friends developed an idea in 2001 that the 9/11 perpertrators were criminals.  This was a bad idea based on the belief that such criminals were angry at Americans, angry at airlines and loosely joined together by their willingness to use violence against the targets of their anger.

The bad idea finally collided with reality nine years after it was first adoped by Obama and friends.  As president of the country, Obama had to examine intelligence data that he and his staff miss-used because they held this bad (criminal actions) idea.  In fact by the time that three criminals had acted in Obama's first year as president he threw away the bad idea and concluded that a group of cohesive determined Muslims were enemy combatants carrying on a terrorist war against Western Society and modernity.

It took nine years for the human created bad idea to stumble in the face of reality.