Ideas Matter More Than People

Many people act as if ideas could not possibly be worth living, dying, or killing for, when true ideas are the only things that could ever deserve this kind of reaction.  Any worldview that insists otherwise is incoherent, for to say that ideas could not be so important actually undermines any attempt to call something else worthy of such passion.  After all, if anything at all is important, truth itself--true ideas--must be important first and foremost.

Perhaps the most common thing people contrast with the alleged triviality of fighting over ideas is assumed importance of living for other people as a whole, as if the value of human life is in any way a self-evident, logically necessary (in itself) fact of reality.  However, absolutely nothing about the veracity of this is obvious or easy to confirm.  The reason why so many people dismiss ideological concerns in the name of relationships with other people is their own intellectual laziness or inability.

It is ultimately impossible for people to matter unless the idea of human value matters, the truth or falsity of that idea itself being contingent on other metaphysical factors--but if ideas must matter in order for people to matter, ideas have a greater significance than people alone ever could.  One of these things is more foundationally important than the other could possibly be, and it should be readily apparent to any serious thinker which one this is true of.

It is possible for humans to have objective value, but only if truth has objective value (this is a necessary prerequisite because it would be true that humans are valuable).  It is possible for truth to have objective value, but truth having value does not necessitate that humans also have value.  One does not have to know if either human existence or truth has any genuine significance (in terms of objective meaning) to know the aforementioned relationship between these possibilities.

Even if every person has an immense cosmic value by virtue of being a person (as the tenets of Christianity hold), true ideas would still by necessity matter more than people, even though they are not sentient beings, but rather abstract concepts that conform to reality.  Thus, it is truth that can deserve whole devotion of each individual person.  In comparison to the wholehearted and rationalistic pursuit of truth, concern for others for its own sake is at most petty thing to live for.