JUDGE THE IDEA (NOT THE PERSON) Have you ever met a perfect person? Me neither. I have heard many great ideas disseminating from people who with their divine presence have propelled society forward along its moral journey – people like Mahatma Gandhi, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Vandana Shiva, John F. Kennedy, Rosa Parks, and millions of others. Their ideas have helped to shape our definitions of what is good in the world. However, they were still human beings. Each of them had flaws, made mistakes, caused harm at some point in their lives. For it is impossible to know what “good” is without an understanding of “evil.” This is the nature of the world in which we live – the yin and yang embodies all qualifications about the world. Human beings are an interesting species capable of creating the most beautiful things and acting with a kind of compassion that deeply touches the soul, reminding us of our true life purpose. They are also capable of incredible evil, much of it being broadcasted over the nightly news and written in history books. The truth is that every human being is flawed, capable of choosing to be filled with light or darkness in each moment. At different times in our lives, we can all remember doing things we knew to be good and other times doing things we knew to be bad. Intuitively, we already know this. It is called our “conscience.” In society today, many people feel justified to discredit an idea by pointing to some personal flaw in the originator of the idea, many times with the flaw being completely unrelated to the subject of the idea. Should we discredit all of Albert Einstein’s ideas on peace because he helped create the Atomic Bomb? If the idea that “the earth is beautiful” were uttered by Adolf Hitler, does that make the idea untrue because of the unfathomable depths to which he drove the human spirit? It is only by knowing evil that knowledge of good can be known. It is only be experiencing cold that we can feel warmth. Since all of us are capable of (if not practice) both good and evil in some point in our lives, it would become impossible to evaluate an idea based on its merits. To discredit an idea, one could simply point out a flaw in the human being that verbalized it. And since we are all flawed, all ideas would therefore be discredited, and we’d get nowhere, fast. All ideas should be judged on their merits, not on the personal misgivings of the individual. As we live during a period in time where we need many good ideas fast, let us learn to discuss and evaluate ideas based on their own merits, divorced from whatever personal character traits are associated with the individual.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:02:38 +0000
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