We Love and Create False Ideas
As living beings we have the strange capacity of creating
and loving ideas. It’s part of our human nature. For us, to
know the world is, to a large measure, to conceive ideas
about that same world.
These ideas of us aren’t, obviously, copies or faithful
translations of reality. Our eyes do no see reality as it
exactly is. «The nature of phenomena cannot be understood by
the eyes», stated
Lucrecius, more than two thousands years ago, foreseeing
what physicians and other scientists today confirm. Our eyes
and senses do not pick up reality itself. They pick it up
according to models that are in our brain.
Sometimes our brain simplifies reality (we would be mad
otherwise):
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human
life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the
squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which
lies on the other side of silence.
Mary Ann Evans (George Elliot), 1819-1880, English writer,
Middlemarch
Other times, it follows an enormous fantasy. Some of our
ideas are absolutely unreal and mythical (the Santa Claus
idea, for instance), and we sometimes know it.
But most of our ideas – though largely mythical or false –
are deeply accepted and elevated to the category of truth:
the idea of men’s right to enslave other animals; some
romantic love conceptions, assuming that a particular woman
or man is a divine creature; the idea that women are
inferior to men (a stupid idea shared by very intelligent
men in the past). And so on, and so on…
In a sense, we are slaves of our ideas. They live in our
brains, and they guide us. The ideas we love most –
concerning duties, good, evil, god… – are nuclear ideas that
drive and determine our lives, including our ideas of love.
We are their slaves, and we practise many crimes and wars
because of them. As Victor Hugo said:
We are in the hands of those gods, those monsters, those giants:
our thoughts.
Victor Hugo, 1802-1885, French writer, Quatre vingt-treize
Or, in other words: our ideas.
Books, Films,
Cultural Stuff on these and
other related issues? See
Love Essays Store
(in association with Amazon)
Love and Ideas? See also:
Reality is a
Product of Our Ideas. We are Slaves of Them
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- We Love to Create False Ideas (of Love) that determine our Lives and Reality
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