Where The Real Power Is

"You have surrendered the fight at its most important point, and you have nothing serious to say."

(Part of one of my comments, here.)

How? Dear god... how in the world to make the point that ideas are "real", too?

People stumble through complexions like this as if something like a "health-care crisis" just settled on us out of god's blue sky like a tornado: they take that as their starting-point, call it "reality", and attempt to proceed as if no malignant human concept ever had anything to do with it. They see no point in fighting bad ideas with right ones -- ideas that integrate as widely as possible and necessary -- just rolling-over, instead, for the ideological fait-accompli that's right up in their faces and willing to surrender it as a fait-accompli without ever looking at its roots in human action: wrong, but nonetheless open to understanding as something that could be set right with the same power of intellect, but only turned in the proper direction.

This is an enormous barrier. It's the mentality that would look at a practical application of "2+2=5", realize that it's wrong, but shrug and say, "Well, there it is, it's 'real', and we have to try to work with it."

The power of ideas (like I said: very bad ones in the case of health-care) is right in front of them at every turn, and their idea is to give up the fight for ideas. Why? Because they're not "real".

I cannot imagine what it's going to take to dissolve this deadly myopia.