The Danger of Concepts

I had a dream the other night. On waking, I knew I had to write a column about it. Not about the dream, but about what I was seeking to teach in the dream. In the dream, I was giving a lecture to college students. What I was saying was terribly important to me, for it concerned one of my pivotal life themes. I was telling the students how important I believed my main idea was, which I emphasized they needed to grasp and apply in their own lives. Wow, did I have passion about this idea in the dream. I so wanted these young persons to understand what I was saying, for much was at stake concerning their well-being.

The idea was this: be very careful about concepts and how you apply them. Why? Because you will live within them – for good and for ill. I said that as soon as you define something or someone with a term, be it “friendly” or “freakish”, you will begin to live within and act out of these predetermined categories. This is what “prejudice” is all about, when we judge the whole on the basis of a limited, ultimately limiting sample. We render such decisions about individual persons, groups or races, places or regions, even foods.

A classic example of a kind of conceptual prison comes from a major study of mental hospitals, back in the 1960's. The study was conducted before what came to be called “deinstitutionalization,” when many, if not most of these hospitals were closed, and the vexing problem of homelessness shortly began to reach new levels. The relevant finding of the study was this: within two weeks of admission, persons came to live and act out of their diagnostic categories. For instance, during this transitional period, a person defined within the category of “paranoid schizophrenic” would begin to act noticeably more like how someone in that category was supposed to act. This is, of course, an example of the “self-fulfilling prophesy,” which states that persons tend to become what they are expected to become, by significant others and subsequently by themselves.

There is something called the “mental patient mentality.” Having worked at three mental hospitals, I have seen persons within a few weeks of admission begin to think and act as if they were a “mental patient.” Once they made that determination, it was difficult to get them to believe otherwise. They were living in an “as if” world, living what one psychologist termed “fictional finalisms.” They were making an untruth the truth by their belief and actions.

As a young man I wrote, as much to myself as anyone else:

“Concepts are the most dangerous idols. And they can form the most inescapable prisons.

“Life must be fully lived; it must be fully experienced. But those who would conform life to their concepts have death in their midst. Those who would circumscribe life seek to stand apart from it, as if to view life in all its nakedness.

“But they will not succeed. For life is the viewer, not the seen. You see not life, but its offspring.

“Seek not an image of the holy; seek its presence. Seek yourself. Be that which is beyond image.”

Concepts are essential tools to assist our operating in the world. Just remember that you and everyone else are greater than their contents.