Local, National, and Global means of communication, our minds, our histories all form a collective Idea Schema that we are all working to change or reinforce, whether through discovery, argument, or force. This vast, complex network of ideas forms a sort of soup, similar to the Earth’s genetic soup. Ideas compete like genes in this environment, the stronger or more effective ideas survive. This is part of the fairly recent Science of Memetics: a survival of the fittest, only instead of genes we have “memes.”
All Governments are a sort of community contract, ultimately only as powerful as its citizens make it. Even a Dictatorship requires some form of popular, if not majority, support. Only Democracy seeks to foster and harvest the power of ideological consensus, providing an official communal arena for ideas to compete for public favor. Just as Capitalism is a Marketplace of Products, Democracy is a Marketplace of Ideas.
Here we take ideas inside our personal Self Schema and place them into the Idea Marketplace, allowing them to compete with, compliment, or reinforce the memes already there. Just as a Scientist must conduct experimentation to convert hypothesis to theory, so must we all conduct disputation with society in order to convert our personal ideas about the world into public policy:
Disputations: Democracies are fueled on the conflicts of ideas that occur within them, like stars burning on the energy of fusing atoms. Fair-minded, informed, and respectable debate provides the cleanest burning, most efficient fuel. Here you will find explanations of the debates our Society currently faces and fair articulations of how to find the ideal mean.
Theories: If you’ve read this through from Observations to Hypotheses to Disputations to here, you know that this site is nothing but Theory. Here I have gathered some of my own modest conclusions. I leave you to judge them. This entire site is, after all, my Self Schema communicating with yours.
Resources: The steps I think each participant in the Idea Market should take before becoming involved and sources to inspire deep thinking and debate. These are my inspirations, what are yours?
Disinformation: These are the closest approximations to the “villainy” of the system. Here are people, institutions, and rhetorical devices that bend logic, distort facts, and otherwise stoke the fires of unconstructive fury in our society. Understand these to prevent yourself from being pulled into and victimized by another person’s skewed belief system.