The Workshop of ideas

2025-07-04

Have you heard of “the marketplace of ideas”? I certainly did, and too many times.

The idea is very easy: Politics is about competing ideas, and the “good” ones, choosen by the process of election or votations, win.

It’s easy because it’s a simple concept, but also because it is as uncontroversial you as you can get. You are against the marketplace of ideas? Are you Stalinist or something?

This is – of course – complete garbage. How is the metaphore even meant to be understood? Do you buy idea with your vote? Or, is it rather the idea that buys you? Like really? politics is about buying people? What even?

Thankfully, with The Magic Of The Internet®, we don’t have to speculate. The Wikipedia article on “marketplace of ideas” says that it’s US Supreme Court Justice Holmes that first used the concept – in an opinion on the constitutionality of making illegal the expressison of your views against armament.

Indeed, the metaphor is that of the meme. Ideas are like viruses that jump from head to head, killing incompatible ones with might, only the strongest will prevail. That’s literally it. It’s a darwinist interpretation of politics. Where people, actual people, don’t even have any agency. They are the battlefield. We The People, are the theater, the scene on which the actual play runs, we ain’t actors of the play. The marketplace of ideas is on top of us, and stamps us. We are at best witnesses to the might of the ideas.

Also What The Actual Fuck do you think a marketplace is?! Have you ever gone to a market, Justice Holmes? You probably have a domestic to go there for you. So, for your information, the place where savage beasts fight each other for the pleasure of the people is called “the Roman circus”, not “the marketplace”. A marketplace is a place you go to exchange money for stuff, like leeks. As far as I am aware, my coins did not fight the leeks to know which one will prevail in glorious battle.

And it doesn’t end there. Like the way “free speech” got distorted to the level of meaninglessness in US Supreme Court decisions. It would be laughable if it wasn’t the reason the US is now n°2 in the list of shithole countries in any sensible vacation guides.

But we like free speech right? We like to hear from both¹ sides, compare the ideas, and then pick the best ones.

Do we? Do we? In fact we don’t! We just like to hear easily rebutable nonsense that is opposition-shaped and nod approvingly at people who says to us what we want to hear. I’ve done activism, I’ve talked to people I disagree with, and boy is it annoying and unpleasant. Engaging sensibly with opposing views, judging it, and adopting it when it passes muster is not how politics works, nor is it how you adopt new ideas. Isn’t it glaringly obvious? Have you ever done that? Who do you think you are fooling?

So, fuck – you say –, how do people change opinions? What’s the point of politics if people can’t adopt new ideas? What is to be done?

Do not fret, comrade.

First and foremost, people do indeed adopt new ideas. That’s as glaringly obvious as the fact you don’t adopt a new idea just because it valiantly slaughtered the previous ones in your brain.

What happens is Sex. The ideas find each other in your brain, and, if compatible, will combine to create a new idea that is the synthesis of the previous ones.

Oh boy, we are back to Hegel 😳 If you call yourself modernist, you have to accept this as a fact, otherwise, you are just a poser.

I don’t call myself modernist. For various reasons, not the least of which is how it fuelled the murderous doctrines of WWII.

Notice how we, as humans, individuals – in this framing of The Bordello of Ideas – are still the scene on which the actual actors (the ideas) play. Instead of being stomped in some sort of gory tragedy, the representation is a horny vaudeville.

But it already has something more than the brainless metaphore of The Marketplace of Ideas. It allows for synthesis. Now, new ideas enter the game. At least, that explains why society is not static and actually evolves. It still fails to place the human in the theory².

Where do new ideas come from? It is with immense regret that I inform you that ideas do not have gonads, so we have to develop a theory of idea formations that don’t rely on Sex.

That’s where I namedrop The Enigma of Reason. It’s very simple: by nature, we, humans, are difficult to convince; We hold to our pre-existing ideas as to dear life; We see a mote in our brother’s eye, and pay no attention to the beam in our owns. Like, it’s not just me that says it, a crazed monk of the 2nd century CE said it too (and wrote it in the Bible). So, before marketplaces or roman circuses, how did our ancestors survive in the savana, if they are so bad at reasoning? So prompt to believe the dumbest shit?

The answer to this enigma is that we weren’t alone: Humans are a social creature. And when groups of humans took decisions, and someone in the group was like “this is dumb as shit”, they would express their dissent. And then there would be a debate, everybody would weight in, point out the mistakes in others reasoning, and the result would be a better decision.

The nature of the decision is independent of what anyone thinks. And it happens to always be better than any single person would decide by themselves.

Maybe not everyone thinks the decision was the best one, but all agree it wasn’t the worst. The debate discovered new truths, challenged reasonings and forced people to face their contradictions. Everyone changed their tune a little bit, without necessarily converging, but certainly gaining new tools to form new better ideas in the future.

And that’s how people grew and survived. I’ll go as far as saying that, in fact, pre-historic humans were better orators than us. The problem of modern life is not just sedentarity, it’s also contradictionlessness³.

The modernist line of philosophy is deranged: It has humans as instrumental to ideas. What ultimately matters are ideas, and humans are subsidary to them. I hate it. If humans aren’t the ultimate goal, then we can get rid of them without remorse. It’s nonsense. The opposite is true. Ideas are instrumental to humans. Humans make ideas as tool for their wellfare. This is how it works in your everyday life, and it’s how it works in human history.

Ideas are our tools, and discursive debate is our workshop. We partake in it, not as passive consumers, but as toolsmiths.