How to Have Ideas Responsibly: A Guide

Many young students like me are very comfortable in their intellectual lives. However, having ideas can be dangerous: it’s easy to hurt other people or yourself if you don’t know how to think responsibly. Here are a couple of ways to do that.

Irresponsible Thinkers

Anybody can be an irresponsible thinker. However, young people are particularly likely to develop irresponsible intellectual habits.

Take a scene from my life for example. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school (the first pandemic summer), I spent hours a day writing stories. I produced thousands of pages. And I learned a lot.

But I failed to realize that my new obsession was isolating me from my friends and family. I was physically alone due to the pandemic, but I locked myself into a cage of mental loneliness, too.

I was profoundly unhappy. It was one of the most difficult periods in my life. But it wouldn’t have been so difficult if I had been intellectually responsible.

To be clear, self-inflicted pain from isolation is only one outcome of thinking irresponsibly. Intellectually irresponsible people can do a lot of damage: to themselves, the people they love, even to people they don’t know.

With that said, here are a few tips to think more responsibly.

Tip #1: Honesty over truth

As thinkers, we tend to fixate on truth. History professors teach the true events of the past. Physicists and chemists try to work out the truth behind natural phenomena. Judges try to get to the truth behind a crime.

So much of our world is based on the idea that in any situation, there is a single truth: an objectively right reality, which is correct no matter how incorrect we are. But that eternal, objective truth is very hard to find.

And in so many situations, the truth is less important than we think. Imagine this. If a man is sentenced to death for murder, a judge has determined that the truth of the situation is that he murdered people. So the court executes him. But if, twenty years after his death, new evidence emerges that proves that he didn’t murder people, the “truth” will no longer matter—because the man is already dead.

Take the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, for example. In 2004, Willingham was arrested, convicted, and executed for burning down his house with his daughters inside, all three of whom were killed.

But just months after his death, several arson experts reviewed the evidence and determined that the scientific analysis used to convict Willingham was invalid.

That’s when we realize how little “truth” matters: after we’ve already acted on it.

We imagine that we are objective observers, looking at the world and finding truths, but we’re really not. We’re part of the world.

More importantly, our minds are not perfect. We miss things. Make mistakes. Misremember. Everything—even the question of whether or not a man is a murderer—comes through the filter of our unreliable minds.

It’s hard to accept, but, logically, we can’t completely trust our ability to find the truth, let alone know when we have found it.

It is intellectually irresponsible to imagine that we’re capable of finding the truth all the time. People who believe that also tend to believe that they’ve found it. That’s why innocent men like Cameron Todd Willingham get executed.

But that doesn’t mean we should just give up. When people look for truths, they produce good and useful things: modern science and technology, art, philosophy.

I propose that we take a different and more responsible perspective: being honest. Instead of imagining that we’re objective observers who chase objective truths, we can be honest in our pursuit: our minds are unreliable. Truth is elusive.

That way, when a truth we believed in inevitably proves itself to be false, we don’t fall apart. We don’t lie to ourselves. Instead, we reevaluate, and we move forward in a different, better direction.

Tip #2: Don’t love ideas

This is something I’m particularly guilty of. I tend to love my ideas—it’s part of the reason why I write in the first place.

But when you love an idea, you close yourself off. People who love ideas keep themselves from further intellectual growth.

For example, I’ve recently fallen in love with the ideas of Buddhism: nonself, interdependence, nirvana. They’re mind-blowing.

However (thanks to a lot of mistakes in the past), I’m trying not to love these ideas too much. If I did, I would end up shaving my head, dropping out of college, and joining a monastery.

An example of the danger of loving ideas comes on a national level. Our constitution is over 200 years old. We could only improve it by rewriting it.

In fact, Thomas Jefferson himself suggested that a whole new constitution should be written every twenty years because:

“One generation is to another as one independant (sic) nation to another“

Thomas Jefferson

But we don’t. Instead, Americans, since the inception of the country, have fallen in love with the ideas of our original constitution, and we’ve barely changed it. We’ve mostly just disagreed about how to interpret it.

As a country, but also as individuals, we shouldn’t love our ideas. We should let them grow or die as they will. They’ll get stronger that way. Our thinking will, too.

Tip #3: Don’t identify with ideas

In a letter written by Friedrich Engels in November of 1882, he describes a quip of Karl Marx’s to his French son-in-law:

“Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.”

“If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”

Karl Marx

What Marx meant by that was that the French intellectuals who called themselves “Marxists” actually held very few of his ideas, and were misusing Marx’s famous name. That is a worst-case scenario of identifying with ideas.

Ideas can’t really be a part of a person: we can create them, but we can’t hold onto them like we can other parts of us. Imagine if our memories or feelings could be taken up by other people as easily as our ideas. That would be absurd.

If you pick up a pencil, even if you made that pencil yourself, it isn’t an extended part of you. Of course it isn’t. It’s a tool. It can be handed to somebody else, shared, replicated, or even completely reshaped.

You can’t even own an idea under copyright laws—you can only own the expression of an idea (i.e. you can own iPhone but not the idea of smartphones).

When we identify with ideas, we build walls in our own minds. We limit ourselves. It is very hard for a Buddhist to embrace any other ideas with an open mind because they consider themselves a Buddhist, not just a curious thinker. The same goes for any intellectual identity.

On the other hand, distancing our identity from our ideas keeps us open-minded. That’s intellectually responsible.

Why I wrote this

After twenty years rife with intellectual irresponsibility, I’m just starting to learn how to be responsible with my ideas. It’s not easy. I often find myself loving an idea, or identifying with it—and I constantly forget that some truths are unattainable.

The goal isn’t to flip a switch and be responsible. That’s impractical. Rather, my goal (and I hope yours, too) is to grow into responsibility.

I believe that if everybody learned to be responsible with their ideas, the world would be much better. I admit that it’s a dreamy notion. But it isn’t impossible. So I’m going to keep trying. I hope you do too.