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depends what you think evil is, and in what sense you take an idea to exist in the world. or what you think an idea is.
an idea is a pattern. a pattern is an organization of information. information is defined by the patterns that organize it.
a bit of information, however you construe that, can be made amenable to activation via multiple patterns, but not at the same time.
on the other hand (and there's always an on the other hand) the frames of reference that people drag into activating a pattern are almost never clear. so they're always multiple, it seems to me, because they're embodied directly, so integrated into the pattern-generating apparatus that is memory, which is a pattern of patterns that is as it patterns so is through its patterning so isn't an object even though when one says "memory" so uses a noun one implies an object-ness or an amenable-to-being-formalized-as-objectness and the same obtains with the word "idea" and pattern for that matter.
but it is the case that there are socio-cognitive pathways or tendencies and these are specific and/or particular. in a social-historical sense. the social imaginary, really. which is particular to each social-historical space, which is each space and the range of forms that can be produced and which, in turn, produce it.
in the soft totalitarian system we live in largely shaped by the ideological production apparatus though of course not entirely. were it entire, we'd just be repeating. were we just repeating there'd be no cognition really. by which i mean no active assimilation of the various environments through which the systems of systems that we are move.
ideas are patterns that operate in particular textual spaces or media spaces as if they existed outside the processes of appropriation, or making and remaking. these spaces are externalizations of memory. when no-one is reading or listening or remembering, these patterns are like things forgotten.
if ideas are patterns and patterns are bits of information that are defined through how they operate in patterns, then a dictionary definition is just another patterning. if you look at a noun as a word-object and assemble the results of that looking in a particular space, ordered in a particular way, you get a collection of word-objects that is a dictionary. definitions are not the only way to think about meanings. that is why i mention this.
are ideas evil. i would think that patterns can define information in ways that makes their activation dangerous. it's a context-dependent kind of danger, i would think. is dangerous that same as evil? depends what you think evil is. what is dangerous? o, for example a notion of nation that hinges on a notion of identity that presupposes to operate the exclusion of another, or a range of others and that aligns the ongoing production of identity with the ongoing production of exclusions (in the benign-ish form) or eliminations (in the less benign form with the difference between a matter of degree).
is national identity therefore evil? depends what you mean by evil. is it dangerous? if the pattern that informs its social operation resemble the above, then yes it is. when does dangerous become evil? depends on who you're talking to.
maybe.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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