Episode 4.30: Ideas are the Music of the Mind.

Ideas are like music because they are not necessarily true or false, just worth playing with, listening to, hearing, thinking about regardless of what they seem at first to mean or however much they challenge our existing assumptions. Sometimes they challenge and clash like discordant music, but that’s fine: we should allow them nevertheless to speak to us. Contrast the notion of “degenerate” art in totalitarian régimes, that rejects the new as “counter-revolutionary” because it threatens, and suggests the work has not yet been fully done and finished (as no work ever is), and so perhaps that the current self-styled leaders may not have had the last word.