November 2019
If you discover something new, there’s a significant chance you’ll be
accused of some form of heresy.
To discover new things, you have
to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is
obviously good, other people are probably already working on it.
One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the
shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to.
But anything you discover from working on such an idea will tend to
contradict the mistaken assumption that was concealing it. And you
will thus get a lot of heat from people attached to the mistaken
assumption. Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon,
but it’s probably always an ingredient in the resistance to new
ideas.
So it’s particularly dangerous for an organization or society to
have a culture of pouncing on heresy. When you suppress heresies,
you don’t just prevent people from contradicting the mistaken
assumption you’re trying to protect. You also suppress any idea
that implies indirectly that it’s false.
Every cherished mistaken assumption has
a dead zone of unexplored ideas around it. And the more preposterous
the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it creates.
There is a positive side to this phenomenon though. If you’re
looking for new ideas, one way to find them is by looking for
heresies. When you look at the question this way, the depressingly
large dead zones around mistaken assumptions become excitingly large
mines of new ideas.