A Quote by John J. McLaughlin
Conflicting views and contrasting ideas are the essence of all great debates throughout history, from the Greeks to the Oxford Union Debating Society. Today, we turn to television for the creative clash of ideas on matters that touch our lives.
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I was in the debating society at school, I was the president of the Oxford Union, and then I became an MP in the Nineties.
Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
Senior men have no monopoly on great ideas. Nor do creative people. Some of the best ideas come from account executives, researchers and others. Encourage this, you need all the ideas you can get.
Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. Ideas are common. Everybody has ideas. Ideas are highly, highly overvalued. Execution is all that matters.
In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.
Our world, so we see and hear on all sides, is drowning in materialism, commercialism, consumerism. But the problem is not really there. What we ordinarily speak of as materialism is a result, not a cause. The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and the outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.
Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.
You need people who have their own views, whose views you respect, whom you can have a productive disagreement with, and work out ideas which you might not have come up with, or who improve on ideas you had.
Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man's forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world.
One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.
The future. Space travel, or cosmology. Alternate universes. Time travel. Robots. Marvelous inventions. Immortality. Catastrophes. Aliens. Superman. Other dimensions. Inner space, or the psyche. These are the ideas that are essential to science fiction. The phenomena change, the basic ideas do not. These ideas are the same philosophical concepts that have intrigued mankind throughout history.
What is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones.
The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
conditions.
Liberal arts colleges have traditionally provided a forum for debating ideas. Avoiding controversy and 'playing it safe' by not inviting - or disinviting - speakers with 'controversial' views stifles debate.
Throughout chess history, great debates have raged about the pros and cons of hanging pawns. The debates are nonsense; the answer is cut and dried. If the pawns can be attacked and forced to move forward, they are weak. If they can be defended and remain where they are, they are strong.
The Greeks, the Italians, and the Indians, from whom we get our ideas, erect monuments to ideas; we erect ours to men, and of such monuments we have an oversupply.
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