The Marketplace of Ideas as a Formal System

Quickly jotted down...
  March 29, 2006

There's a weird self-referential interplay between “marketplace of ideas” and “ideas” proper.  This is because the marketplace is itself an idea, of course.  As such, it's a meta-idea, an idea governing the establishment of other ideas.

Any idea's goal is to prevail over its rivals and become accepted as the truth (whether it is, in fact, true is quite irrelevant here; the goal of dominance and, therefore, survival and propagation, is political rather than dialectical).  Since a “marketplace,” for want of a better word, has become the accepted arbiter of an idea's right to exist (at least in modern Western societies), any idea hell-bent on existing should consider rigging the marketplace in its favor.  It's akin to words bending grammar to their will.  Postmodernism has been very good at doing this, for example.

Refinement: The “marketplace of ideas” is but one instance of a larger phenomenon whose name I don't know (assuming it has a name).  An idea battlefield, perhaps?  Or meeting space?  It's not some celestial mill of Truth that separates out the chaff of lies; the winners inside this space aren't necessarily true.  It's a process that, just like grammar, is content-blind: any sentence that's well-formed passes.  The political goal then is to alter the rules so that only your “sentences” are considered well-formed.

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