A SUBTLE DISEASE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4185, 13 September 1939, Page 11

A SUBTLE DISEASE

READY MADE IDEAS. Probably the most subtle disease from which this generation is suffering is vicarious thinking. Some minds are mere intellectual rag bags containing a mass of miscellaneous ideas not one of which bears the impress of the owner. It is a perpetuation of the worst feature of the old educational system, under which children learned things without acquiring corresponding thoughts. In examinations they repeated parrot like what they had heard, but every item in their mental wardrobe was ready made. It is a danger to which every generation has been exposed, but never can the danger have been so clamant and persistent' as in this. Mass suggestion has become an empirical but highly successful science. It is to a large extent the explanation of those ideologies which are such a source of international anxiety and which have added such an ugly term to current vocabulary. By the power of the ready made idea normally intelligent men and women are being made the slaves of propaganda. The fact is so obvious that it should make all of us suspicious. May not we, too, be unconscious victims’

Every Intelligent person’s ideas should be based on ascertained truth, but the search for truth demands activity of mind. That form of activity many people find distasteful; it is a form of which not a few seem incapable. Both groups are good customers of the dealers in ready made ideas. It is, of course, desirable to keep the mind ever open to the latter. But it is wise to be on guard against those that are served up with much verbal ingenuity; they will be so often found to consist not of valid arguments but of intriguing adjectives. “Few men think,” said thg great philosopher Bishop Berkeley, “but all have opinions.” One of the serious intellectual leagues of the present day is that these, two things continue out of balance. Men hear some new message, and without troubling to ascertain its full meaning, they reiterate it. The idea was enunciated by someone who seemed to know’; in any controversy, therefore, they can always fall back on their authority. They live on mental sustenance; in exchange for ready made ideas they barter their independence of judgment. On one occasion Disraeli was asked, with reference to a particular question, where he stood. He replied that he “stood on his head,” signifying his head as the repository of his own ideas. He claimed and exercised the right to apply to polites something of the technique of the scientist. If that process were more prevalent, fewer people would be be going round giving currency to half truths and adopting theories inadequately comprehended. Ready made ideas have their use, but only as material to be woven into the fabric of personal conviction. There is, unfortunately, a disposition to neglect the weaving process. Many people are too lethargic to harvest facts diligently, to sift them carefully. They seek to soothe their conscience with the suggestion that the ready made idea is possibly good enough. One effect is that even people who undoubtedly are mentally alert accumulate a vast quantity of second hand stuff. Their minds, quite as much as their homes, require recurrent spring cleaning. The advertised predigested food may be a necessity for those physically unequal to the indicated process; the predigested idea is a confession of parallel mental weakness on the part of those who resort to it. The worth of every idea must needs be tested by the touchstone of one’s own judgment. Neither loyalty to a person nor prejudice against any class or race should be permitted to stand between the mind and the nude truth. World conditions are changing, no longer from generation to generation, but from hour to hour; it is plainly a world which will not be put right, politically and ethically, by people whose ideas are mass produced. Modern civilisation is undergoing radical reconstruction in all its parts, governmental, financial, industrial. Self-appointed, loudly vocal leaders are shouting “Lo here,” “Lo there," and are offering themselves as the only sure guides out of the bewildering impasse. Masses of men seem childishly credulous or lazily complacent, and in these conditions the propagandists find their chance. Adoption of the proffered, ready made idea avoids the always irksome task of informing the mind and of engaging in itnensive thought. It is because of this that the power of the ready made idea continued to spread. In art and even in religion ready made ideas are so freely adopted that the former ceases to be creative, the latter ceases to be dynamic. - With the world’s problems becoming ever larger and more insistent it is urgently necessary that people should be constructive in their own ideas and critical of the ideas of others. Despite that need, hosts of men and women continue to patronise exclusively the ready made market, with the consequence that they become automatic and sheep like in their mental reactions. It has alaeady been recorded in history that a crowd which shouted “Hosanna!" one day shouted "Crucify!” a few days later. It is the type of thing that can still happen wherever there is lavish acceptance of ready made ideas.