What's to blame; the idea or the executor?
The world is in chaos. People are butchering each other, governments are increasingly surreptitious in their dealings, capitalism has a stranglehold on the world and corporations are the New World Order. All of this stems from ideas, but who's to blame for the bedlam - the person who thought it or the person who executed it?
Times like this, I wish I was better read. I'm pretty sure what I'm about to say has been said before by smarter and more eloquent people than me. However, I barely get time to read my books, let alone all the books.
This came up because John Nash and his wife were tragically killed in a car accident. There's no denying John Nash had a 'Beautiful Mind' and his equilibrium laid the foundation to our current capitalist system. The game he created concluded that if people worked together, the consequences would benefit all the players. However, if the players behaved selfishly, one or more parties would lose. He find out that most people worked towards self-interest. So if you incentivised people, they would work harder in order to achieve said incentive for their own gains. Even if this means cheating the system or each other.
This system was taken on by just about everyone. It forces people to work harder for a gain, no matter how tiny. In effect, creating modern slavery. We work hard for a system for little reward. And because we so desperately want this reward as it gives us the illusion that we're achieving our aspirations of a nice house, nice car, nice clothes, nice holiday, etc. we accept this without question. Therefore keeping us in order.
Nash's ideas were also injected into the NHS. That blessed institution whose main objective was to provide care for the sick and in need for free. Tony Blair's government decided that to make the NHS more efficient, it needed to work more like a business so everything had a target attached to it and an incentive. The result was a drop in one-to-one care. The sick are shuffled along, hurried, treated with indignity, doctors are negligent and malpractice is rife. Because the NHS has put profits before people.
Who's to blame for this? John Nash for thinking of it or Tony Blair for legislating it or the NHS itself for executing it?
I know what you're thinking. How could it be Nash's fault, he was investigating something and couldn't possibly know how it would be interpreted or how humans would react to it? It was just an idea.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was incarcerated. Mein Kampf was just an idea. It is an anti-Semitic body of work that talks about an Aryan super-race. It's all nonsense. Who determines what is "super"? John Nash himself would've wound up in a death camp for being schizophrenic. However, Hitler never killed a soul. His hands are only metaphorically covered in blood. The only thing he killed was his own dog before the Russians took Berlin in 1945. So does this abscond him of guilt?
During the Eichmann trial in newly formed Israel, the man who masterminded the final solution to rid Europe of Jews showed no remorse and felt no guilt, as he was following orders. He was simply doing his job without question. As we all do. Except his had fatal consequences. So is he absconded of guilt? Perhaps it's the soldiers to shot Jews or the Zonder Commander who marched people in, ignited the poison and emptied the chambers that are to blame? How about Bayer who created and sold Zyklon B to the Nazi Party who are to blame? Does this end with the German general public who handed over Jews to the Third Reich or participated in Kristallnacht? No, it all stems from one man. The man at the top of this pyramid of accomplices who helped him literally execute his idea, Hitler.
Stalin, Khan and Mao actually killed people. But still, their body count would never have been so high if it wasn't for the cooperation of others.
When the Borgias immoral fight for power inspired Machiavelli to write The Prince, I'm sure he was just reflecting on how a regime ran. He never thought it would become the blueprint for future regimes to gain and maintain power by any means.
It is the same with Jean Paul Sartre and Karl Marx. They wrote down their ideas, about how terrible capitalism is and spoke out against the middle classes. Their ideas sparked revolution in Russia, Cuba and Vietnam. They inspired radical leftist movements like PLO, RAF and Carlos The Jackal. Neither of them could've imagined the horrors and oppression that a Communist regime would've resulted in. So who's to blame for the gulags, destruction of Chinese antiquity and the Cold War, Marx or Mao, Stalin or JFK?
In the image above, it shows the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb. The father of the bomb Oppenheimer was, as the aforementioned, a Communist. He was disgraced and removed from the Manhattan Project. However, in his later life, riddled with guilt of having created the most deadliest weapon known to man, he spoke out against it. He advocated banning the bomb. He warned about danger of scientific ideas to humanity. Yet, he's remembered for cargo carried by the Enola Gay that murdered thousands of innocent Japanese in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Is it Oppenheimer that's to blame for second worst human atrocity of WWII or is it Truman for given the order or the pilots who actually dropped the bomb?
You could say the same about religion. Jesus and Mohammed were ideas people. They preached their ideas about existentialism. morality and faith to an attentive flock. Those ideas were interpreted over the years by various people, cherry-picked and bastardised until you get to where we are today - a bunch of fanatics who are actually a disgrace to their religion. They've adapted their believes to fit their own ideology. Is Mohammed to blame for ISIS and is Jesus to blame for Westboro?
There is no right or wrong answer. Ideas always have consequences. You may think you're working for the greater good, unravelling the chaos and figuring out the world, but in actuality you're creating something so evil that increases the chaos.
This is the power of philosophy. But we also need the power of the humanity, reason, insight and analysis to properly understand the gravitas of our ideas.
First published 25/05/2015
Times like this, I wish I was better read. I'm pretty sure what I'm about to say has been said before by smarter and more eloquent people than me. However, I barely get time to read my books, let alone all the books.
This came up because John Nash and his wife were tragically killed in a car accident. There's no denying John Nash had a 'Beautiful Mind' and his equilibrium laid the foundation to our current capitalist system. The game he created concluded that if people worked together, the consequences would benefit all the players. However, if the players behaved selfishly, one or more parties would lose. He find out that most people worked towards self-interest. So if you incentivised people, they would work harder in order to achieve said incentive for their own gains. Even if this means cheating the system or each other.
This system was taken on by just about everyone. It forces people to work harder for a gain, no matter how tiny. In effect, creating modern slavery. We work hard for a system for little reward. And because we so desperately want this reward as it gives us the illusion that we're achieving our aspirations of a nice house, nice car, nice clothes, nice holiday, etc. we accept this without question. Therefore keeping us in order.
Nash's ideas were also injected into the NHS. That blessed institution whose main objective was to provide care for the sick and in need for free. Tony Blair's government decided that to make the NHS more efficient, it needed to work more like a business so everything had a target attached to it and an incentive. The result was a drop in one-to-one care. The sick are shuffled along, hurried, treated with indignity, doctors are negligent and malpractice is rife. Because the NHS has put profits before people.
Who's to blame for this? John Nash for thinking of it or Tony Blair for legislating it or the NHS itself for executing it?
I know what you're thinking. How could it be Nash's fault, he was investigating something and couldn't possibly know how it would be interpreted or how humans would react to it? It was just an idea.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was incarcerated. Mein Kampf was just an idea. It is an anti-Semitic body of work that talks about an Aryan super-race. It's all nonsense. Who determines what is "super"? John Nash himself would've wound up in a death camp for being schizophrenic. However, Hitler never killed a soul. His hands are only metaphorically covered in blood. The only thing he killed was his own dog before the Russians took Berlin in 1945. So does this abscond him of guilt?
During the Eichmann trial in newly formed Israel, the man who masterminded the final solution to rid Europe of Jews showed no remorse and felt no guilt, as he was following orders. He was simply doing his job without question. As we all do. Except his had fatal consequences. So is he absconded of guilt? Perhaps it's the soldiers to shot Jews or the Zonder Commander who marched people in, ignited the poison and emptied the chambers that are to blame? How about Bayer who created and sold Zyklon B to the Nazi Party who are to blame? Does this end with the German general public who handed over Jews to the Third Reich or participated in Kristallnacht? No, it all stems from one man. The man at the top of this pyramid of accomplices who helped him literally execute his idea, Hitler.
Stalin, Khan and Mao actually killed people. But still, their body count would never have been so high if it wasn't for the cooperation of others.
When the Borgias immoral fight for power inspired Machiavelli to write The Prince, I'm sure he was just reflecting on how a regime ran. He never thought it would become the blueprint for future regimes to gain and maintain power by any means.
It is the same with Jean Paul Sartre and Karl Marx. They wrote down their ideas, about how terrible capitalism is and spoke out against the middle classes. Their ideas sparked revolution in Russia, Cuba and Vietnam. They inspired radical leftist movements like PLO, RAF and Carlos The Jackal. Neither of them could've imagined the horrors and oppression that a Communist regime would've resulted in. So who's to blame for the gulags, destruction of Chinese antiquity and the Cold War, Marx or Mao, Stalin or JFK?
In the image above, it shows the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb. The father of the bomb Oppenheimer was, as the aforementioned, a Communist. He was disgraced and removed from the Manhattan Project. However, in his later life, riddled with guilt of having created the most deadliest weapon known to man, he spoke out against it. He advocated banning the bomb. He warned about danger of scientific ideas to humanity. Yet, he's remembered for cargo carried by the Enola Gay that murdered thousands of innocent Japanese in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Is it Oppenheimer that's to blame for second worst human atrocity of WWII or is it Truman for given the order or the pilots who actually dropped the bomb?
You could say the same about religion. Jesus and Mohammed were ideas people. They preached their ideas about existentialism. morality and faith to an attentive flock. Those ideas were interpreted over the years by various people, cherry-picked and bastardised until you get to where we are today - a bunch of fanatics who are actually a disgrace to their religion. They've adapted their believes to fit their own ideology. Is Mohammed to blame for ISIS and is Jesus to blame for Westboro?
There is no right or wrong answer. Ideas always have consequences. You may think you're working for the greater good, unravelling the chaos and figuring out the world, but in actuality you're creating something so evil that increases the chaos.
This is the power of philosophy. But we also need the power of the humanity, reason, insight and analysis to properly understand the gravitas of our ideas.
First published 25/05/2015
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