The Garden

If we attempt to create and cultivate a monoculture of ideas in which we choose strictly and rigidly which ideas are acceptable to grow and tend, our chosen ideas will initially appear quite hearty, and even indomitable as the outlying ideas wither and fall away into a type of compost. The chosen ideology will be planted in neat, uniform rows and social harmony will appear to reign among those who comply with the reigning paradigm.

However, this reigning ideology can only draw nutrition from the intellectual well it knows. Without any challenge to the ideology we will soon find the soil it grows in depleted. We can  add mental fertilizers, doubling down on our perceived need to advance only accepted ideas and vilify and minimize natural stressors- which are competing ideas, problematic results over time and anomalous events that should make us question the primacy of the dominant way of thinking.

In order to breathe life into the troubled ideology, we might bring in people who have diverse identities, but if these diverse people hold only the same rigid ideas as we do, their stewardship of the Garden will yield the same results.

But we will feel better about it. More virtuous, for sure.

As we see the paradigm nosediving, we can redefine the parameters of success for our chosen ideas, proclaiming victory out of the worst results. We can double down on blaming the weeds- competing ideas arising in greater and greater strength, showing greater resistance to our attempts to stamp them out.

We can proclaim that no one but the experts who have sent us down this garden path can even understand what’s happening as our garden rapidly turns to a state of toxic disarray.

As disaster looms under the reign of the ideological monoculture, it becomes apparent that the people who brought this mess into being that they need to hide their tragic and self serving authoritarianism by censoring anything that challenges their ideology.

Is this how our garden grows?