The Perversion and Senesence of Great Ideas

If you’re in the idea game, you notice three things really fast: there are very few great new ideas, the form of ideas lose their power, and a truly great idea will be torn from its moorings and used in perverse ways.

Marx, famously, said that he was not a Marxist and predicted the withering away of the State.  He said that Communism couldn’t happen before Capitalism, but those who called themselves Communists and obtained power came from peasant societies which had never gone through Capitalism and created some of the most powerful and despotic states in all of human history.

What?

It is hard to imagine the historical Jesus (if he existed), who hung out with whores, told people to give away all the possessions, leave their families and who thought that tending to the poor and afflicted was so vastly important that if you didn’t do it God would turn from you, would be happy with so many of those who follow him today, who follow none of his teachings.  Jesus was not a Christian.

Adam Smith believed in public goods, public education, that humans were driven by fellow feeling more than selfishness and that  businessmen were constantly conspiring against the public.  Yet he is known for a single line about the invisible hand, the rest of his writing ignored by those who claim to be his disciples.  One imagines that he, too, might say something like “I am not a Smithian.’

A powerful idea, a great idea, will be misused.  Disciples will seize on that which seems useful to whatever they want to do, and ignore both the essence of the idea (Communism MUST come after Capitalism), and the caveats (Capitalism cannot produce public goods) without which the system will fail.

It is, thus, instructive to seek out ideas which have been little perverted (none have not been perverted.)  Amidst ideas that have worked, and worked, and worked, and done far more good than evil, one stands out: Buddhism. Oh, to be sure, you can find Buddhist bigotry and even the occasional riot (Burma, I’m looking at you); you can find Buddhist monks chopping off people’s heads and playing palace politics, and so on.  Yet, a history of Buddhism shows a belief system which has proved remarkably resistant to perversion.  It is simple, and powerful.

I will suggest that it is because Buddhism is a practice.  To be a Buddhist you must do certain things, with a specific end (removing suffering).  If you do not, you are not a Buddhist.  These practices work, you can measure the effect on people who practice on the brain with modern imaging technologies, you can see them when you interact with dedicated Monks or laypeople who take meditation seriously.  Meditate, send your compassion out to the four quarters of the world, and you become a certain type of person.

A great idea, then, let me suggest, must require something of its adherents.  A philosophy which is empty of practice may be great, but it will be perverted if it does not have a practice which creates the sort of people who are able to live by the idea.

The great sociologist Max Weber looked at how ideas would form people: how the idea of predestination made people work like dogs so that they would have proof they were saved, for example.

Whatever your idea requires people to do is what that idea will become.  If it does not require of them practice which makes them suitable to the idea, the idea will not succeed.

Of course, even if it succeeds, most ideas will eventually be perverted. It’s (relatively) easy to create a great idea that a generation or two lives by, it’s hard to create an idea which is capable of replicating itself down through the Ages.  What is mighty about Buddhism is its sheer longevity.  Twenty-fix hundred years, and it’s still doing more good than evil.  Early Christianity was pretty much perverted five centuries after Christ’s death, and one can argue for earlier than that.  Marxism was going bad even before Marx died.  Smith’s ideas were being used as justification for the very mercantalist policies he argued against within a century of his death.

Pity the great moral philosopher, then (and economics is just a branch of moral philosophy). Most will fail, their greatness destroyed by their disciples, their ideas perverted, their warnings ignored.  Look to the great ideas and ask yourself, “to make this work what sort of people are needed?  Can those people be created?  What would it take to create them?  Are they being created?”

In the answers to those questions you will discern much of the failure or success of any great idea, and will see not just that it will fail, but in what horrible, twisted debased form it will come live, a mockery of the hopes of its creator.

Or perhaps, just perhaps, you will see a bright shining idea, able to create a better world for however long it lives in a form capable of creating followers who can carry it.