We Love and Create False Ideas that Drive and Determine Our Lives and the Nature of Reality

We Love and Create False Ideas that Drive and Determine Our Lives and the Nature of Reality

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