Ideas Reborn

My three-year-old nephew met me at the door of his parents' house yesterday with an urgent message: "hurry! There are ghosts everywhere! We have to catch them!" I instantly fell in behind to join the ghost hunt, before I even had a chance to say hello to the adults in the house. My sister yesterday compared playing with toddlers to a round of improv comedy, and I see her point. As she put it, you have to take a "yes, and" approach. You will get nowhere if you reject the premise your scene partner has already established. You just have to accept it and them supply whatever additional elements come to mind. 

I therefore accepted entirely that we were on a ghost hunt. We charged around from room to room using an air puffer and a toy hammer respectively to eliminate or frighten away the spectral intruders (except for those few that were deemed to be "friendly"). At a certain point, my nephew gestured at me. "Oh no!" he cried, "there's a ghost on your head!" I doubled over and began clawing at my scalp. "Ah! Get it off! Get it off!" Then, in the spirit of improv comedy, I hazarded a next development: "Are they octopus ghosts that drop on people's heads?"

My nephew thought about this. "No," he said, shaking his head. Then he pondered a bit longer. Finally, he declared, "They're octopus ghosts that drop on people's heads!"

Now, it occurred to me that here, in adorable miniature, is a type and model of leadership in all hierarchical organizations. It is a well-settled fact that to obtain the approval of one's superiors for an idea, after all, it is essential that they believe they themselves are the ones who thought of it. Therefore, one may often have to face the indignity of seeing one's best and dearest new ideas strangled in their cradle, as soon as they are born in a meeting; but fear not—their spirit will live on. Even if the boss said "no" to your idea one day, it will appear again thereafter, dressed now as the boss's own brain-child. 

I was thinking about this because I was reading the elder Samuel Butler's Hudibras the other day—a delightful and still-uproarious seventeenth-century poem upon which I have made innumerable false starts over the years but only just completed—and I got to the part where the titular knight's long-suffering squire Ralph offers a suggestion to his superior. Since Sir Hudibras's romantic overtures to his lady have so far been rebuffed, despite an apparent exchange of promises with valuable consideration to back them up, Ralph suggests they take her to court to enforce her commitment as a contract.  

Hudibras outwardly spurns this idea. But inwardly, he is already convinced, and merely waiting the chance to refurbish the idea and subsequently present it as his own. He therefore "in appearance cry'd [Ralph] down," writes Butler, "To make [the latter's ideas] better seem his own/ Resolv'd to follow his advice,/ But kept it from him by disguise;/ And, after stubborn contradiction,/ To counterfeit his own conviction,/ And by transition fall upon/ The resolution as his own." 

So we see the above-mentioned metempsychosis of ideas—what dies from the lips of a lieutenant is reborn as the insight of his commander. 

And so, what is adorable coming from my nephew, occurs on all-too-large a scale among adults. Rather than protesting this fact, one must simply accept it and work with it. If one truly wants the ghosts to be octopus ghosts, and values this idea's realization above any credit that one might receive for it, one must be willing—paradoxically—to hazard the idea in order to save it. One must throw one's own credit on the pyre, so that the ghost of the idea may live on.