On Perfect Ideas

I struggle when I try to share my ideas with others. Oftentimes, in the course of writing a piece, I find myself caught up in a net cast by my own hands. I poke holes in my own beliefs over the course of an hour or longer. Once I find myself sufficiently tangled, I stop, delete the document, and start over with a new perspective, taking into account my previous failure, hoping to come up with something infallible this time around. Doing this over and over, I never find myself reaching a point of satisfaction. A perfect idea without holes. Maybe this is a problem with me and my lack of knowledge, or maybe this is a byproduct of ideas themselves.

I’m not an expert in any sense of the word on any particular topic. Just a twenty-three-year-old who enjoys reading and studying like a medieval scholar in his free time. Given that, I know that I cannot be alone in my experience of not being able to completely shield my arguments from criticism, even among true experts in their crafts. I wonder whether anyone who attempts to have ideas worth sharing with others genuinely reaches such a point of confidence without a comparable level of delusion. Obviously, someone must. Books are written and opinions are published, and I’d like to believe at least some of those authors are of sound mind. Well-written pieces of literature with a single throughline making a grand point exist, but I wonder if, in their heart of hearts, the authors feel they’re completely without a shadow of a doubt correct.

As I ponder that question, my mind turns to Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Marx’s Communist Manifesto, to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and I wonder if they saw holes in Absurdism and Communism and the Theory of Forms and the Four Causes in the same way I see holes in my own opinions. Did they feel they needed to ignore them for the sake of completing their work, lest their idea, however flawed, be buried along with them? And if they did, could they truly be happy with the work they created, knowing that it was so flawed, destined to be picked apart by others in ways that they already understood and also in ways they couldn’t possibly fathom?

Do good ideas unyieldingly come with doubt? Or does the act of creation itself inevitably require a delusion to shield you from your own criticism and from others’? I doubt this is the case. If anything, I would expect that ideas that are shared are shared with the intention that others engage with them and eventually destroy them, so that new, perhaps better, ideas may emerge from the ashes. In this way, the flaws in any position would not really be flaws at all but just a part of said position, inextricably tied to it, like a loose thread on a piece of clothing that, when pulled, leads to the unraveling of the garment in its entirety.

Then is there any such thing as a perfect idea?

I’m sure there is. But maybe perfect ideas are just those ideas so simple that, to use the prior metaphor, they consist of a single thread. A self-evident truth so obvious that nobody needs to write it down. To even think about it. Ideas where there are no holes to poke because nothing is really being said. An idea like that isn’t worth much in my estimation. Nobody ever asked who discovered the sky was blue. And for good reason.

Created 4/26/2025

Last Updated 5/19/2025