Thoughtcraft 2-2: The Will of the Idea
To talk about the will of the idea is not merely fanciful. It is helpful to us in two ways. First, it allows us to think of ideas as entities with lives, and thus to analyze what conditions most conduce to an idea’s realization. Second, and more importantly, when we set about to apply the principles of thoughtcraft, personifying the idea gives us several advantages. Most of these derive from our separating the thought from the thinker, the idea from its originator or champion. The thinker is usually far better off to think of the idea as something owned by or entrusted to him, like a dog that has followed him home, than to think of the idea as intrinsically part of the self. Among the advantages are these:
- It separates the idea from that defensiveness which necessarily surrounds the self. If the idea seems to be one’s self, there is far greater risk in communicating it, far more pain if it is rejected.
- Similarly, even in the most emotionally robust persons, there is a certain rigidity to one’s self-identity. Major changes in one’s understanding of who one is are like earthquakes, shaking up areas of one’s life and thought that aren’t even close to the epicenter. None of us can go through many of these. But if we believe our ideas are us, we take the risk of a self-identity shift each time we entrust an idea to others. Nearly all ideas undergo modifications, some of them radical, on the way to realization. Ego-involvement with the idea will bring about a fear of such modifications, while ego-separation decreases the fear.
- This in turn permits more flexible negotiations among all the parties necessary to the idea’s realization.
- For an organization, it may permit the realization of more ideas. An individual’s or group’s self-identification with an idea may create a jealous attitude toward other ideas, and leads to the stifling of some ideas which may have been of great benefit. Since creative individuals tend to be fickle, most in love with their latest idea, self-identification is a far greater problem for organizations and for adopters of an idea than for individual originators. An organization which learns to view ideas as quasi-autonomous entities will be less jealous, and more inclined to give every idea, even if it competes with another adopted idea, its best opportunity.