Who is right and who is wrong?

The ideal situation is to have a consensus, getting different streams of ideas come to a confluence. But that does not always happen in the real world. Ideas vary as minds diverge, and it puts people in conflict forever. In thirty years from 1618 to 1648, Catholic fought Calvinist, Calvinist fought Lutheran, Hapsburg fought Bourbon, nationalist fought imperialist. Germany lost eight million people to the cruelty of these conflicts.

So, ideas imprecate horror as much as they also incorporate bliss. People think before they act, even when they are acting in the most unthinking manner. Ideas often turn into impulses that sweep through the head like a raging storm. George Bush attacked Iraq because he got the idea that Saddam was hiding WMDs and abetting Osama bin Laden. British historian Thomas Asbridge writes that during the First Crusade, Pope Urban II summoned the knights of Europe to this Christian jihad based on erroneous reports about Muslim atrocities in the East. History has been created by action as much as reaction.

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But then both action and reaction happen at the ideas level. People throw their ideas like guns fire shots. These ideas collide, create tension, prompt action, fester conflict, and propagate enmity. A body of ideas taken together forms an ideology, which becomes a political, religious or social programme, ushering in change. Take the 16th century for example when the world experienced profound liberation of ideas in science and religion. Copernicus reconfigured the universe, Vesalius re-examined the human body, and other scientific achievements re-evaluated man's spiritual state and his role in nature. The Reformation and the Renaissance, amongst many things, fundamentally redesigned man's relationship with God, cutting out the middleman, that is the clergy, by putting creature and creator in direct contact.

In the Middle Ages, the Black Death had reduced the population of Europe by 23 million. Nearly 70 million deaths have been attributed to tobacco in the 20th century alone. Diseases, pestilence and natural disasters must have claimed countless millions over the centuries. But ideas have been amongst the biggest killers of all times, perhaps the single most notorious killer in the history of mankind, if we leave out those deaths which did not happen in the hands of men.

Religion has been the longest standing cause of conflict amongst men. But it is roughly estimated that only two million people have died in the West, resulting from crusades, inquisitions and other religious reasons. But look at the number of casualties in some of other man-made disasters. Second World War (50 million); Maoist Revolution in China (42 million); Mongol conquests (40 million); Chinese Civil War of the 8th century (33 million); and Stalinist Soviet Union (20 million). The list goes on with the Taiping Revolution (20 million); First World War (15 million); Russian Civil War (9 million); Thirty Years War (7 million); and the Napoleonic Wars (2 million). Alexander Solzhenitsyn gives the figure of 60 million people who supposedly perished in the camps and in the prisons under the socialist Soviet regimes in total.

Such a large number of people got killed simply because they could not agree with each other. Christopher Tyerman of Oxford University writes in his upcoming book Fighting for Christendom that the knights of the West did not have any strategic or material interest to fight the Christian wars of the 12th and 13th centuries. They had invaded the Muslims of the East as startling testimony of the power of ideas. All the political upheavals, religious conflicts, social revolutions, personality clashes that turned the wheels of history for centuries, were actually rooted in the difference of opinion.

Thus ideas are important because they provide the impetus for human actions. But what is an idea? It is a conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity. An idea is when we see a flower, hear music, watch atrocities, feel love, show respect, anything that touches our heart, makes us feel, think and draw a conclusion.

The difference of opinion comes from the difference of conclusion. The way it works is like a camera, the light passes through the aperture and the lens captures the image. But that is not enough. The resolution of the camera is measured in Megapixels, the higher the resolution, the better quality of the photograph, because it is composed of tiny dots and the more of these dots can fit in a one inch space, the tinier the dots and sharper the image.

In the same parlance, an idea is as sharp as its resolution, depending on the intensity of thinking composed of the dots of information compressed within the space of a particular conclusion. A hasty conclusion can be a precarious idea, because it may not have enough information to give the right picture. Again, a very late decision might miss the picture in the long haul for too much information.

Three things are important, when it comes to processing information for sound ideas. A man needs knowledge, emotional balance and integrity, so that his ideas can be objective without any personal bias or intellectual flaws. Most ideas fail because they are impulsive by nature, compulsively executed by people with subjective agenda. Such ideas are more or less wishlists of selfish people, who may or may not see the whole picture.

Different people see different pictures, and that is how they are right and wrong. ID and superego drive them to believe in their respective pictures, and then ego does the hard selling. And this perpetuates like a vicious cycle, the picture adopted by one generation influencing succeeding generation when it has to adopt a picture in its own turn. That explains why hatred perpetuates itself like a downward spiral feeding on itself. That explains why people engage in wars from time to time, and sooner or later, history repeats itself.

Lady Bird Johnson, the former First Lady of the United States, once said: "The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom". Perhaps ideas need to clash to untangle concepts to foster understanding. People need to brainstorm, people need to discuss, filter thoughts and emotions before they draw any conclusion. Walter Bagehot, English economist and essayist, explained why that is not the easiest thing to happen: "One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea", he concluded.

Every day people go through that pain. They conceive, present, confront and defend their ideas, which lend essential voice to their existence. People must be able to think and express their ideas. But they would also like to see their ideas win, because man-made disasters are nothing but inordinate arrogance leading to conflicts.

"A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea", Victor Hugo wrote in 1850s. All murders and mayhems, clashes and conflicts, vengeance and violence, hatred and hurting, wars and worries happen when people do not agree. We get peace, stability, harmony, love, scientific inventions, technological advancements, and era of goodwill when ideas prevail and everybody agrees.

By now you must be convinced that what lies at the heart of human dynamics is the age-old question: who is right and who is wrong? If not, you are wrong. You must be thinking you are right. See, it is already happening!

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.