IDEAS RULE THE WORLD

There is no truer statement than this. Ideas are powerful and potent forms especially in their kinetic states. Irrespective of how we qualify them and their conceivers; the ideas of idealist, vision of visionaries, thoughts of thinkers and dream of dreamers. History is replete with such people who dared and conquered with their ideas. At times such ideas become easily entrenched, but most often than not they are received with skepticism like the Joseph of biblical times “let us see what will become of the dreamer and his dreams” or even outright resistance.
The catalogue of every human accomplishment is a rich history of the triumph of ideas, ideas that oil the wheel that further society’s progress and advancement. In every field of human endeavour mankind’s transitions; from the Stone Age, to the Agrarian Age, the Industrial Revolution, and the present technology/hi tech era, is a mirror reflection of a transition and movement from ideas to ideas

Examples abound of great ideas. The Wright brothers who dared to conceive the possibility of man flying in an era many thought the skies were the absolute preserve of the birds. Men like Bill Gates who dreamed of a time when almost every home will have a computer. This was a period when computers were as large as building and only very few large corporations possessed it. Presently you can even put one in your pocket. Some ideas extremely morbid, like Adolf Hitler who fathomed a superior German race with the rest of Europe subjugated to it. Usually, the conceivers might be forgotten but their ideas outlive them


We live in more fluid times; now, more than ever before there exists a free flow of ideas and information. The boundaries created by distance and seas no longer exist. Our limitations now exist only in our mind. Winston Churchill once said in speaking of our times and beyond, with some keen prophetic insight. “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind” meaning that the conquerors of the future are not those that usurp large territories and colonies with brute and force, but those that use their minds and fruit of ideas that it produces to conquer and explore new worlds of possibilities, taking on the skies and even when that is exhausted reaching out for the moon and stars.

The greatest ignorance will be to say like the quote credited to Charles Duell one time Commissioner, US patent office in 1899 “everything that can be invented has been invented”. But like someone once said, “it is difficult to say what is impossible for the dreams of yesterday are the hopes of today and the realities of tomorrow “.

Akinwale Babatunde Ayorinde