Ideas and Imagined reality
Being born in the Asian society, I am used to hearing the word “karma”. Karma refers to the consequence of any actions or ideas that will decide what the future looks like. For the first impression, it sounds religious and unscientific, but it holds the truth inside. In fact, everything in the world is the consequence from the past and we, who are in the present, decide what the future looks like.
Ideas play an important role in human being. Scientifically, human is just an evolution without any directions. Realistically, nature did not create heaven or hell, human’s ideas did. First, people have an ability to imagine, then they create an idea. After that, the idea shapes into perspective, so they believe that idea. Hence, credited to language, they are able to tell everyone around to believe what they believe. The idea has no shape and it is even different from a lie. It is called imagined reality. In IR, it is called perspective. Imagine two people wearing two different glasses, one wear white glasses and another wear black glasses. When they view the same corner of landscape, one will think the landscape is dark and another will think it is bright. No one is wrong because what make them see differently is not the landscape but the glasses, which is the idea or perspective.
In Western culture, debate is one of the effective way to discuss which idea is good and which is bad, which is right and which is wrong. Western people have developed tolerance in conversation and they easily accept the defeat if other’s idea is better. In contrast, conversational argument has always been a warning for everyone in Asia. Talking just to win will be regarded as immoral and being too logical will be regarded as immature. Actually, in whatever way people use to convey the idea, a great idea always gathers the majority to believe. In a way, that belief create change, and sometimes a revolution.
However, because idea is just the reality that has been imagined, it is not stable. It needs to be modified and it cannot last forever. For example, Capitalism was an economic idea created in Europe. It brought prosperity to Europe, which was the good consequence. But Capitalism also created bad consequence such as slavery and colonialism. Therefore, Communism was born along to challenge Capitalism, which was too extreme at that time. Capitalism got modified and beat Communism. If there was no Communism, capitalist world would not be nice as today. For another example, the Code of Hammurabi was created to make the society stable by dividing people into classes. Still, the code collapsed because United States Declaration of Independence claimed that all humans are equal.
In short, what we call reality is actually sometimes just an idea which has become our perspectives, then decide how we see the world. We have to accept that we all are living under the influence of someone’s idea.
