A world in turmoil needs new ideas to sustain it. Several major changes affect our daily lives, and it is only when abstract thought meets materiality that we can experience the solidity of an idea. When we think about the world today, we can be both seized with cold fear at the idea of the challenges we will have to face, but we can also see these problems as major opportunities. Problem solving is not just the domain of scientists, it is everyone’s business whether we are trying to make the world a better place at our level or whether we are making innovation, whether practical, social or unconventional, the cornerstone of our lives.
New ideas are both everywhere and nowhere. Life is an eternal restart for those who put innovations in perspective and look at them through the lens of history. Changing life, changing the world is often the result of incremental improvements: one does not suddenly revolutionize a world, it changes slowly but surely in such a way that it seems immobile if one takes a reduced time scale. There are breakthrough innovations, however, which play a major role in the way we project ourselves in space and time. An idea, before taking its physical form, germinates for many years in a sort of collective unconscious before one or several individuals take it up.
The idea is the basis of civilization, without idea, there is no progress and without progress we lose the sense of history. The search for ideas is the pillar of a society. Strictly speaking, there is no profession that bears this name today. However, in the future, researchers of ideas and concepts will be counted in millions. Nowadays, they take the form of writers, philosophers, engineers, essayists or artists of all kinds. A perfect term for this new profession would be ideazethete (ancient Greek ἰδέα idea (“visible form, aspect”) and διώκω zêtéô (“to pursue”), δίζημαι (“to seek”) originally).
An ideazet would be someone whose existence is oriented only around the search for ideas in order to put them at the service of the community or to reserve their benefits to a smaller group (companies etc.). Because of our life, our job, our daily life which exposes us to new problems, we are all potential ideazetes.
More people implies more problems, but also more brains to solve them.
