Masses

You can take the most beautiful philosophy, the most cogent argument, the loftiest religion, and share them with just a few people, and even though the congress of ideas, the words spoken, the phrases repeated, are the exact ones you started out with personally, they turn into something, by virtue of being shared with masses of people, completely different and manifest completely different ends than what the philosophy, the most cogent argument, the loftiest religion, meant to do personally and before.

It's like, when as a child, you took a stick and stuck the stick in water and watched it bend, yet you knew the stick was the exact one you held in your hand when it was dry, and that physically, it really had not changed. Yet it was bent. Somehow, when ideas are shared and espoused, they become bent. Though they're not, really.

This slight criticism is now popularly used against politically right wing christians who take the personal message of Jesus' sermon on the mount as holy writ, yet will vote for presidents who will lead us into wars and rumors of wars. The best example of this I can think of, that has stuck in my craw, is the bumper sticker I spy more and more often that simply says 'Who Would Jesus Bomb?'

But don't think this sort of criticism is limited to the 'right.' There are plenty of people who believe that Marx was reading Plato's Republic when he crafted his communist manifesto, and we see the dystopian destruction of the individual and freedom that resulted when masses of people bought into such a beautiful philosophy.

There is still some hidden dynamic we have not tamed that is found in taking one person's ideas and projecting them into the minds of tens. Or hundreds. You see where I'm going with this.