V for Ideas

Everyone who has changed the world in any manner started with an idea. Inventions, wars, revolutions, events, cultures etc. all started in someone’s mind.

Ideas, when adequately marketed and given the time to propagate, could be more than just words, they can influence people and make them do things they didn’t naturally think of doing. Politicians use this to their advantage to get elected, and in recent times they have begun combining this with data to devastating effect — see populism and Cambridge Analytica.

The Gunpowder Plot — an idea to blow up the British House of Lords in London on November 5, 1605, is the major plot element of the 1982 book, V for Vendetta which later became a film in 2005. In one of the very first scenes of the movie, V, a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask levelled London’s criminal court, hijacked the state-owned British Television Network and delivered a compelling speech encouraging people to rise against the government and meet him at the gates of the House of Lords 365 days from that day.

V planted an idea in the minds of the people, an entire year in advance and undoubtedly thousands of people gathered at the house of lords when that day reached and eventually forced a change.

The Guy Fawkes mask has become one of the most famous symbols of anti-government protests all over the world all because of an idea someone had in 1605 which became a book that was made into a movie 400 years later in 2005.

This is just an example of how ideas can propagate over the years and become a thing, so, don’t let your ideas die inside you.