A Practical Guide To CultureSample

It’s Not Just Information

We could also call the information age the age of ideas. Every song, movie, tweet, sermon, news story, podcast, banner ad, and billboard tells us something about what to believe and how to live. Even information we think is inconsequential to our lives still communicates ideas about life and the world.

Ideas are sometimes true and sometimes false. They may be trivial and shallow, or they may communicate deep thoughts about the meaning of our existence. Those peddling the ideas may have the best of intentions, or they may be trying to deceive or harm us. They may be genuinely trying to persuade, or they could be trying to manipulate our emotions. Ideas take various forms, but they must be taken seriously. Why? Because ideas have consequences.

Not all ideas bring equally grave consequences, of course. The more important the idea, the more significant its consequences. That’s why it’s foolish to think of ideas as innocuous words on a page or as heady concepts that concern only philosophers. If ideas stayed safely in their books, as many people wrongly assume, then batting them around would be as harmless as a friendly tennis match. But they don’t stay in books. They grow legs, walk off the page, and head out into the world. They influence the way we think and live. They shape entire societies and drive the course of human history.

That’s why we must also say that bad ideas have victims. Real people, including innocent bystanders, suffer the consequences of bad ideas. For example, the bad ideas about economics that a state power enforced led to tens of millions of deaths in the twentieth century alone. Bad ideas about celebrity, fame, and physical appearance leave teenage girls confused, starving, and purging. Bad ideas about masculinity leave young men in perpetual adolescence, without purpose and addicted to video games. Bad ideas about sex and relationships fuel the hookup culture on college campuses, leaving students broken, used, and lonely.

Ideas are particularly difficult to navigate today, not only because they are so many, but also because they come at us so fast and from so many directions. For this reason, many of us can’t even recognize ideas as ideas, much less think critically or articulate sensibly about them. This is no small problem. If we can’t master ideas, ideas will master us. If we passively absorb the information around us, someone else is thinking for us.