When I stumbled upon an early draft titled “Hierarchy of Ideas,” I realized that I had the bones of a schema that can sit alongside my CRAP framework as a kind of “compass” for orienting ideas. So, I decided to build my original ramblings into more useful, straightforward terms.

I’ve thought a lot about what makes an idea important; in their purest form, ideas are the basis of everything. After all, possibilities are infinite. Therefore, ideas are infinite in their layers and permutations. Sometimes, ideas overlap and it’s hard to know where one ends and one begins. In reality, though, ideas are part of a continuum of ideas, not just a bunch of singular ideas floating around in a vacuum. Still, each idea can be appreciated and studied individually. However, ideas must also be understood in the context in which they form. 

In order to do this and keep some degree of sanity, though, we need some sort of loose framework to help guide our studies. To this end, we must be able to map how ideas operate on different levels of reality, a way to situate concepts so we don’t confuse names for truths or shortcuts for understanding. Keeping things beautifully trinary, I’ve come up with a three-tiered hierarchy: foundational, expressive, and transient ideas. 

Foundational Ideas

Everything we see around us is governed by universal principles. I call these foundational ideas, These are the universals you can’t really strip away without unraveling reality itself. They exist independently of human perception or consensus. They’re not inventions so much as discoveries. 

How do we test for a foundational idea? Well, if you stripped away human perception, would it still exist? Gravity, yes. Democracy, no. If every human vanished, foundational ideas would all still exist without us. The deep structure of reality persists whether anyone is around to interpret it or not. Math, logic, the principle of cause and effect, and the concept of space-time all are foundation. They are what govern the laws of possibility. They don’t depend on context or culture.

However, things start to blur a bit between foundational and expressive when we talk about concepts in math and the formulas, theorems, and shortcuts we humans use to express them. This is where we enter the realm of expressive ideas.

Expressive Ideas

Expressive ideas are the ways we shape and communicate the foundations of reality. They are human translations of the foundational into forms, symbols, and emotions. They make the abstract legible. Think of them as crystallizations of the foundational into human terms: art, formulas, theorems, language, etc. Expressive ideas bridge the abstract with the actionable,  the infinite with the immediate, and universal concepts with lived experience. They’re attempts to frame, translate, and dramatize for a wider audience.

For example, math isn’t formulas. It exists as the deep grammar of the universe that has existed for all time. Our formulas are only our expression of what we’ve learned over many centuries of discovery, rediscovery, and constant revision of our understanding of universal principles. You can memorize a textbook and never touch the truth it points to.

The way to test an idea to see if it’s expressive is to ask: does it represent something more primal or abstract in a way that makes it legible to others? Does this idea represent or communicate a deeper truth? Even when we are describing emotions, which are states of being rooted in all living things, how we describe them is expressive.  Wrath is a perfect example; it’s rooted in the foundational (the survival instinct and fight-or-flight), but is expressed in human culture, literature, and moral frameworks as wrath. We give it a name; otherwise, it’s just a nameless truth about the universe.

One thing that’s long bugged me is how we are taught math in school. There’s overreliance on memorization of certain formulas, shortcuts, tables, and theorems, without being given the underlying reason of why they are that way. Yes, math is the universal language of science and everything, and the underlying truths and facts we discover through its study are foundational. But math is more than just a massive collection of ideas. It’s a way of understanding the universe at a deeper level.

You can memorize what a theorem says without actually comprehending it. When you are tested on what the theorem says and are told to refer to it by an arbitrary name or number (as I was in high school geometry class), that is not learning. Learning what that theorem actually means when realized in the Universe is learning. In one class, we had a list of numbered theorems we had to regurgitate, numbers that were assigned in a completely arbitrary fashion. We were being tested on how well we took a test, not how well we understood mathematical concepts, and this is not only silly, but hurtful to real education.

Transient Ideas

Transient ideas are the most surface-level. They are contingent on consensus, shifting constructs that depend on culture, time, and consensus. They’re useful, but also provisional and fragile, mutating constantly. These are the socially agreed-upon scaffolding we use to navigate the foundational and expressive—names, categories, fads, slang, brands, hashtags, historical moments, and even entire measurement systems. They are man-made expressions, but on a tertiary level when related to foundational and expressive ideas. We use them to navigate other ideas. They may not last, but they’re endlessly generative.

People can greatly alter expressive ideas, too. However, they still are based in directly expressing something universal. Meanwhile, transient ideas are more tools for people to understand other less foundational ideas, which are infinite in their permutations. While transient ideas aren’t “less real” than foundational ideas, they’re much more ephemeral. They are usually built on top of expressive ideas, and don’t directly relate to anything foundational. Transient ideas mutate, vanish, reappear, and often only carry meaning inside a given context.

To test if an idea is transient, just ask: if consensus disappeared, would the idea survive? For example, the number π would still exist. But the name “π” for pi could change at any time if enough people decided to name it differently. How we name and perceive things can change dramatically even over the course of a few human generations. This can then lead to changes in how we express certain ideas or even how we understand foundational ones.

When Ideas Overlap

Now, these three categories aren’t watertight boxes in which to keep ideas. They’re lenses we can use to focus more on how universal an idea proves to be. The real fun of working with ideas comes in when we overlap the foundational with the expressive and the transient.

• Foundational + Expressive: Beauty, love, justice—deep realities expressed in countless human forms.
• Expressive + Transient: Art movements and styles, political parties and movements, hashtags, and memes.
• Foundational + Transient: Cultural and religious symbols, units of measurement, scientific models—temporary names and frames wrapped around universal principles.

Why Forming This Hierarchy Matters

The common folly is that most people treat what are ultimately transient ideas as if they’re foundational—mistaking the name for the truth and the shortcut for the principle. That’s where confusion (and sometimes madness) brews. People can latch onto an expressive or transient form without grasping the deeper structure.

Confusion arises when ideas are mistaken for something they’re not:

• Treating a transient (like a label) as if it were foundational (the reality it points to).
  
• Memorizing expressive forms without grasping the foundation they translate.
  
• Overvaluing the ephemeral scaffolding at the expense of deeper understanding.

Treating a transient like a foundation is how cults are born. Treating an expression like the whole truth is how education goes wrong. But intentional, purposeful overlapping of ideas in this hierarchy are also fertile ground.

• Beauty, love, justice = foundational and expressive.
  
• Movements and styles = expressive and transient.
  
• Myths and money = all three at once.
  

So, I created this hierarchy to be like a sanity map for ideas: where am I standing with this idea? Am I clinging to a label (transient), wielding a form (expressive), or touching on something eternal (foundational)? It’s a way to check where you’re standing when wrestling with truth, language, or culture.

For each idea, we now have a sanity test: 

Strip away consensus. What survives? Foundational.

Strip away expression. What survives? Foundational, again.

Strip away foundations… nothing survives.

Ideas don’t float separately. They ripple and braid with one another inside of an infinite continuum. The hierarchy is less a staircase than a lens. If you stand in the wrong place, you can mistake the shadow for the thing itself, and this is where things go wrong.

I plan to expand on this hierarchy as I work on the CRAP framework, exploring how criticism, rhetoric, aesthetics, and philosophy operate across these tiers. I could also explore examples of when societies collapse ideas into the wrong category, and develop visuals (venn diagrams or  flow maps) to show how tiers of ideas interact.

• A.D.