Things I'm Thinking About #1: Open Thoughts Travel Further

A new series where I write down what I'm thinking about as I think it, instead of waiting until I've reached a conclusion.

I'm standing at the sink washing dishes, and an idea shows up half-formed. Almost immediately I feel the pull to turn it into an essay: pick a thesis, research it, land the plane. I do like to write, and writing helps me. It catalyzes the idea. But it also drags me toward a conclusion, and once I've reached one I tick the box, say yeah, I wrote about that, and move on. The idea stops moving. My essays have gotten too conclusiony.

So this is an experiment. What if the piece is just what I'm thinking about, and how I'm thinking about it?

The thing I keep circling: transmissibility

The idea of a meme was revolutionary, and I don't hear people talk about it enough. Dawkins gave us a way to treat ideas like genes: things that replicate, mutate, and compete, and survive by how well they spread, not by how true they are. Then the internet shrank "meme" down to a picture with text on it, and the foundational concept got buried under the joke.

My hunch is that a finished thought and an open thought travel differently. A closed essay says here's what I concluded. An open one says here's how to keep going. A thought that's still moving might be easier for someone else to pick up and carry.

Propaganda, and the operating system we inherit

Propaganda has been on my mind lately, with the election, and after forty years of being old enough to vote. Propaganda is meant to spread an idea, so it sits close to memes. Maybe the difference is steering: a meme spreads on its own, while propaganda is someone choosing the idea and the channel on purpose.

But I think a lot of what we think and say is propaganda, in a broad sense. Our lives are pre-programmed for us: the dogma, the belief systems, the things we were handed. Then we reach an age of decision, where we're legally responsible for ourselves and have autonomy. If we open our minds, we can step beyond what was handed to us. Not by discarding it, but by no longer letting it completely control how we see the world.

I'd go as far as saying much of what people hold in their minds was manufactured for them, even their ethics. Ethics is a form of self-governance, and a stated value is just another transmitted idea until behavior tests it. I'll believe it when I see it.

Why I want to write this way

It lowers the stakes. I'm not researching toward a thesis, I'm capturing what's already running in my head. It lets me look back ten years from now and see how my thinking evolved, including what I got wrong. And it's a way to share and communicate: a half-open thought gives people something to respond to, so it becomes a conversation instead of a broadcast.

Maybe I don't write four pieces on transmissibility like I did before. Maybe I write one, or two, and let the thinking stay loose.

What tips us over: anomalies

When I asked what moves a person from inheriting beliefs to examining them, my first answer was the one scientists use. In Thomas Kuhn's account, a paradigm holds until anomalies pile up, the observations it can't explain, and patching it costs more than replacing it. For a person, it's the moment life keeps handing you things your inherited framework can't explain, and questioning the framework gets cheaper than defending it.

That suggests examination isn't really a choice. Experience forces it once the anomalies outnumber the explanations.

It also changes what a writer can do. I can't hand anyone a conclusion without it becoming one more installed belief, which is just propaganda with good intentions. What I can do is lay the anomalies out, the places where the story we inherited doesn't quite add up, and let the reader trip over the crack on their own. My job becomes curating the cracks, not announcing the fix. That's the real case for leaving a piece open: the last step belongs to the reader.

Where this leaves me

Here's what I'm still turning over: if anomalies are what break the spell, can people go looking for them on purpose instead of waiting for life to force it? And what was the anomaly that cracked it for you? Tell me in the replies.