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Introduction: Ideas, Reality, and Saving Lies They said, "lOu have a blue guitar, lOu do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." -Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar" Things as They Are In the distinctly hyped paragraph that closes his General Theory ofEmployment , Interest, and Money, J. M. Keynes wrote, "[T]he ideas ofeconomists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back ... it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous...." Could he be wrong? Probably not, at least about ideas: they do matter. Ideas are like the blue guitar: they shape our world.1 They do not, however, shape it entirely. Reality also matters; events continually confound ideas. Moreover, we do not need ideas to feel the world's effects; viruses also strike those who know nothing of l. Keynes 1947, 383-84. He published that book in 1936. The "madmen in authority ," I surmise, were not only Hitler and Mussolini, as one might think looking back from after the Second World War, but also elected politicians and other men of influence who, at the time Keynes wrote, were trying to cope with the Great Depression, the financial and industrial slump that began in 1929 and continued into the late thirties. ''Academic scribblers" identifies people like himself or, a generation later, the three economists featured in the first part of this book, or any scholar who pretends to have an expertise that might change things in the world. 2 Introduction virology. The diphtheria bacillus, not the idea of diphtheria, killed children. But everything understandable-everything that we can talk about, argue about, or plan to deal with-requires an idea; from that perspective ideas also are a kind of reality, something that we experience . Without ideas we cannot understand the world. For that we need concepts, representations, models, structures, schemas, symbols, theories, world views, imaginaries, discourse, narratives, constructs, and the like, which, in some way not easy to define, connect us with part ofthe reality that is out there. For sure, much of the world-as we experience it-is not amenable to reason, but some ofit is. Using ideas is like prospecting: sometimes you find what you want, yet much remains undiscovered, and there is always the risk of getting hurt or doing harm. Ideas-to push the matter to an extreme--can also be thought ofas lies of a special kind. Ibsen, in The Wild Duck, used a noun, livsl¢gnen, which is glossed as the "life lie" or the "saving lie," or the "lie that makes life possible." Some of the lies told by the characters in that play are what now is fancified as "the economical use of the truth" or "lawyers' truth"-lying by omission, people withholding facts that they do not want known. Other lies are willful misrepresentations of fact. But the life lie is different. It is the fiction that people build up about themselves-who they are, what they do--and about how their world works; they live inside the lie. Then the maker of tragedy may not be the one who misrepresents the truth but the honest person, the zealot, who believes that truth alone matters and should be laid open even when it destroys the life that the lie made possible. The saving lie is also known to us as faith, religion, or, especially, truth. Any idea, any belief, to the extent that it is pronounced "self-evident" and shielded from doubt and questioning, is a saving lie. The ideas that we use to probe our experience-hypotheses, theories , and even what we accept as fact-have a similar contingent existence . They are abstractions, selections from a reality that is fuller than they are and may surface to prove them mistaken. Consequently, they are provisional, constructed for our convenience; they help us to understand what goes on. The real world is still there, however, and sometimes an idea that strays too far from it will bring disaster.2 What that distance might be, why we habitually stay with ideas that are mani2...

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