Ideas are scarce
Recently a professor I greatly respect, Shruti Rajagopalan asked me a simple question. She asked me ‘What are the ideas that your peers think about?’. And as soon as she asked the question, the fog cleared, and my face dropped. I thought as hard as I could, and nothing came up - except a few exchanges on philosophical pop culture, and normative theories. And then it hit me. Most of us have stopped thinking about ideas. I scanned through numerous conversations I’ve had with my friends ranginf from maggi, hostel, chai, girls, university, sports and whatnot and realized that rarely in those conversations did we ever speak about things that really mattered - the capital I ideas. Ideas that run this world. Ideas that matter. Ideas that inspire you.
How did we find ourselves here?
I studied in a military school where discipline was where your vocabulary started and discipline was where it ended. There was almost no exposure to ideas. We had history, social sciences and civics - but no ideas. Even though my teachers were decent, none of us could latch on to the essence of the lessons. That when we read about the French revolution, liberty was not just a 7 letter word, it was something people have fought wars over. That when we read about civil disobedience, not having sovereignty wasn’t an academic problem to be asked for 5 marks, but something that people killed for, and sacrificed their lives over. In school nobody used to talk about anything remotely significant. We were engrossed in the rituals of high school kids - playing sports, screaming at each other, talking about (the lack of a ) love life etc.1 We weren’t taught to think outside our classrooms. So that’s what our intellect was reduced to, to the mundaneness of a regular class. I graduated school topping my subjects, but failing in understanding the world.
I came to college thinking high of myself. After all I had score above 90% in PCM and secured admission in a prestigious college. I thought I was pretty smart for people my age because I didn’t know better. And the illusion continued until I joined the debating society of my college. I remember attending the initial sessions where suddenly I was hit with complicated terms like marxism, socialism, queer theory, capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism etc. These words hit me like bullets, because at the end of each these sessions I would feel eviscerated. I would first, marvel at what the hell I just heard, and then felt dumb not knowing them. After many such sessions, I shed my fear of asking questions and slowly started to enter the world of ideas. I asked my seniors, I watched videos, I read books and articles, I listened to podcasts. I was trying to learn. But I asked myself, why did I not know any of this before? I had spent a good 18 years of my life before this. What the hell was I doing? More importantly, what the hell were the people around me doing? Why did nobody tell me any of this stuff?
You see the most fundamental form of ideas that are passed onto everyone during their upbringing are religion and the moral code. We are told that we have to respect gods, observe subservience to gods and pray to them. We are also told, by our parents, teachers and the moral science books that some things are good and other things are bad. The default ideas that are culturally encoded into the population are:
Pray to God.
Respect elders.
Be moral.
The first two are dogmatic ideas. So they don’t help anyone much unless they agree to the dogma (which is perfectly fine). The last one is abstract and vague, and doesn’t contribute much to one’s life. Which is to say sure, be moral - but being moral won’t help you when you think about why the world is how it is. It won’t help you answer why is Pakistan’s economy collapsing, or why does a cab hailing service charge me more when it rains. So clearly, you can’t make do with the ideas you’re taught culturally. You need more. To understand the world, you need more ideas.
But before we go further, what is an idea? A simple definition is that it is ‘a thought or a suggested course of action’, or ‘an opinion or belief’ etc. For me, ideas are lenses that help you to make sense of the world. They problematize what we consider normal and give us utopias to work towards. Ideas also mobilize one to work towards something they consider ideal.
I think ideas are broadly of two types. One are ideas (or concepts) that try to explain something. Why is something the way it is. For example, why do large corporations engage in anticompetitive practices? Because they have an incentive to become a monopoly and be the only player in the market to take up all the profits. Economics of monopoly explains this. It is a concept, an idea. Or, why do I feel bad if I sit around at home doing nothing after my exams are over and I have no work? Because one of the alleged side effects of capitalism is that we attach our self worth to products we produce and not intrinsically to our existence. Critical thinking explains this. The other form of ideas are solutions. When you have an idea to solve something, any problem - that is also an idea. Entrepreneurs come up with new ideas all the time. That’s their job. To come up with new ideas to solve problems. Scientists come up with new ideas to synthesize something new. Engineers come up with new ideas to manufacture a new technology. All of those are ideas.
At first you learn an idea as a concept to understand something. It could be a political philosophy concept, a scientific concept, a sociological concept, a philosophical concept, whatever. And then when you understand it, understand the problems associated with it, you move onto the next stage of ideating i.e. ideas as solutions. You ask yourself, okay if this is the problem that exists how do I solve it? For example, one first learns about how poverty works, why do people get pushed into it, what are the existing safety nets for it, what are the effects of it. Once one understands that, one asks the question of okay, how do we solve this? Of course, I’ve taken one of the biggest problems of the world for this example, but the point is these two forms of ideas can be linearly attached to each other. But over the spacetime of ideas, they’re not linear. They’re simultaneous. I could be solving a problem with an idea I had for a specific problem, whereas still learning about something new.
The point I’m trying to make about ideas is that ideas help you understand the world, and yourself. Ideas make you stay sane in an insane world. Ideas are the anchors that you hold on to when everything around you doesn’t make sense. Ideas would always be by your side, even if no one else was.
Ideas make the world tick.
I will describe my brush with ideas in my first degree as flirting with ideas. My interface with ideas was motivated by an incentive to do better at debating. I used to read about concepts so that when my opponent waxing eloquently in debate rooms, I am not dumbstruck. Then after some time, I used to read so that I can become the one waxing eloquently in debate rooms and leave my opponents awestruck. The incentive structure was flawed. Even though our seniors would advise us to not read only for the sake of debating and read for the sake of knowledge, but let’s be honest - no college kid wants to read about Chomsky’s theory of manufacturing consent by will unless it is included in or adjacent to the curriculum. So I would flirt with ideas here and there. Pick something up from a conversation here, ask about a new concept there. Nothing substantial. And it was so because none of these ideas were ideas I wanted to know about. So when college ended, I graduated pretty much in the lower half of the class, but decently placed in my understanding of the world. I now knew what critical thinking was, I knew about socialism, Marxism, capitalism, and other political isms. I had a pretty decent understanding of the world. But what I severely lacked was depth. I didn’t know anything deeply.
Then came the pandemic, and my second degree. I entered my second degree with a promise to myself. I promised myself that I will be committed to learning this time around, unlike the first degree. So I plunged myself into books, and curriculum yes. But more importantly, into the internet. I often describe to my friends how the pandemic really turned me into an internet native. I live on the internet. Which does not mean that I spend most of my time away from the real world and on the internet. It means that I feel at home when I am on the internet.2 Aided by this comfort, I read and read and read. Blogs, articles, review pieces, forums, discussions and whatnot. I watched as many videos I could. Events, lectures, livestreams, podcasts, explainers - anything. And the more I read, the deeper I went into my interests. The more I read, the more I began to understand myself. Which ideas I liked, which ideas I disliked. Which ideas were hopeful, and which ideas were a waste of time. Which ideas were the future, and which ideas were relics of the past. And I developed. I gained a deeper understanding of the ideas that interested me. I read more, heard people speak, listened to podcasts, asked people questions on twitter. And finally I began to get a sense of the ideas that I want to think about.
You see one has to be very careful about what one chooses to think about, given that we have finite computational power, and finite time. We must consciously choose to think about the things we want to do something about. And this is not an abstract lesson in not overthinking, despite how it sounds. What I mean is that if you want to know more about an idea, or a framework, then you have to think about it. Clearly and deeply. You have to sit down with your thoughts. You have to make sure you don’t let the mundaneness of the regular blow away the ideas you want to develop. For example, I am deeply interested in free speech and have had ideas for papers that I’ve wanted to write since some time now. But I let the small stuff get in between myself and this idea, every day. Everyday I would be occupied with something or the other and find myself in a position where I had no time to think about the things I wanted to think about. Enough days passed, and now I’ve graduated and those papers were never written. If only I had consciously thought about this, carved time out for this, deliberately read and discussed this with my peers and professors - I might have a paper by now. It’s not even about having a tangible outcome such as a paper. Here, a paper symbolizes the development of an ideas to a place where you think it makes sense. Everyday, countless of us let life pass by and ideas die. How many people with great ideas must have died without working on them just because they let their lives go by and never stood once to think. Most ideas never see the day of light. So much progress was, and is lost everyday because people don’t think about ideas.
But why think about ideas at all? Why does anyone think at all? Because they are curious about knowing the answer to their question.3 You think about ideas because they answer your questions. You think about ideas because it helps you make sense of the world. You think about ideas because you want to solve a problem. You think about ideas because you want to know more, and more, and more, and more, and then some more.
My face had dropped when the professor asked me the question at the beginning of this piece because I realized how most of us go about our lives tangled in the silliest of issues, debating the most pointless of things, and being concerned about the smallest of things. I realized I had become one of such people. I realized that people around me were doing the same. We all had become mere agents of junk thoughts. This is not the life I want to lead. I want to lead a life where I’m actively thinking about issues that are close to me, where I’m talking to people who agree/disagree with my opinions, where I can work in the direction of my ideas, where I can make the world a better place. I truly believe that we all must think deeply about the human condition, find ideas that inspire us to work for the better, and work in that direction. But none of that can happen if we don’t think about ideas. Ideas are scarce. People who think about ideas that matter are scarcer.
It is a question worth asking if students should be expected to have the capabilities to discuss ideas in any shape or form, or if that is imposing too high a burden on them. I believe that many students who study in elite schools are taught concepts like socialism, capitalism, existentialism etc. So there is evidence that these kids can understand and interact about ideas at some form at least.
I mean the internet and not specific apps. I mostly hate spending time on social media apps. Yet I still manage to.
Another reason why people stop thinking about ideas is because people stop being curious. Life gets in the way. It becomes more and more difficult to hold onto your curiosity.
Indeed it was good Idea to write about ....