Since this column is read in many countries, let me explain "beanie babies" to those who may not grasp their importance.

Beanie babies are toys, cute little animals with cute little names. They're manufactured here in the upper midwest, at least the real ones are. They're good examples of how to create artificial scarcity in a consumer economy. Some beanie babies are hard to find, so Peanut the Elephant or Chilly the Bear will sell for a thousand dollars.

Beanie babies illustrate the dangers of living in a digital world as well as a consumer society. When the value of a commodity or an idea is manufactured and therefore arbitrary, artificial demand inflates prices and invites fakes into the marketplace just as it does in the world of ideas.

Beanie babies are cute enough, but easy to fake if you don't mind inferior fabric or stitching. It's all in the name, and the name is on the tag, so beanie babies with fake tags are flooding into the United States. Collectors have paid a fortune for a "Grunt the boar" made in Shanghai, not Chicago. The fakes are sold over the Internet too, so people have paid a premium for an image of a copy of a stuffed toy.

That may sound insane, but ... we are good consumers, after all, and once our basic needs are met, what else are we going to buy but things on which we place an arbitrary value, making a market for goods or ideas, then acting as if they matter?

Living near the home of the Green Bay Packers (a professional football team), it's easy to see how sports and the digital simulation of fantasy games is one way to channel society's free-floating anxiety and hostility into an arbitrary activity. When entertainment (including professional sports) and information services generate the energy flow of a global economy, it is downright unpatriotic not to participate in the madness.

As one paid to make speeches, I see the speaking "industry" in the light of bogus beanie babies. Many speakers spend hours perfecting the presentation of someone else's ideas. They test the winds of popular interest and jump from horse to horse as they ride, following the wind. Of course, we all feed on each other's ideas, but unless we know the difference between snatching food and planting gardens, we live lives of debasing self-deception, drinking from a dribble glass and wondering why we're always wet.

What IS the real value of what we write, or say, or communicate through electronic media? Richard Dawkins popularized the notion of memes, contagious ideas that replicate rapidly. Some memes are life-giving and empowering, but how do we know which ones? In a world in which anyone can say anything, how do we know which beanie baby is real?

The answer, of course, is that no beanie baby is worth a thousand dollars, and only a willed belief in arbitrary value makes us think it is.

The creative ideas that transform our lives are always free.

One of my talks is called "The Stock Market, UFOs, and Religious Experience." In each of those domains, the menu if often sold as if it's the meal. In a world in which money managers take a cut of the total assets they invest regardless of performance, yet 87% failed to beat the averages last year, selling beliefs, images of God, and stories of communication from the mothership ought to be a snap.

The bottom line in all three is that there IS something real eliciting our projections, but the buyer had better learn to separate iron filings from a magnet.

In a knowledge economy, information is capital, but wisdom is gold. And gold is currently devalued.

Powerful ideas are rare, and those who see truths emerging over the horizon like the first light, long before the dawn is even a possibility in most minds, wade against the tide. In an information economy, the new business model is: ubiquity => mind share => brand equity => success. In the realm of ideas and values, we also begin by giving our best away for free. Give, give, give! and the coalescing of positive energy becomes a spiral like stars in a Van Gogh painting, enabling us to live on the energy that eddies back into our lives. How much will there be? Enough -- there is always enough, enough to sustain us and remind us what matters most.

Springs of water that originate as trickles swell into life-giving rivers. Even in a world in which free spring-water is bottled and sold.

Which ideas matter most? Those that we can seize and make our own, creative insights or abstractions the apprehension of which immediately changes our lives forever. Truths that set us free. Ideas that like good mentors or good coaches quietly put the reins of our lives back into our own hands.

We can't stop bottom-feeders from stealing ideas, nor software pirates from making CDs, nor thieves from faking beanie babies. But so what? If we understand the real value of ideas in the first place, anybody who disseminates them is doing ourselves -- and the world -- a favor. Powerful life-giving ideas always diminish the need of our egos for a security, a permanence, a safe harbor that in this world simply does not exist. They transform the very context of our lives, that deep place from which we come to everything else, they create a platform inside our selves or souls on which we stand in the middle of the air and darkness through which we are always plunging. They give us the ability to live from the inside out, grounded in the source of ideas and capable therefore of always generating new ones.

Those real ideas enable us to grasp the patterns that point beyond mere data toward the energy that fills the universe and points in turn beyond itself to that which we do not know how to name much less invent or bottle and sell.

January 10 1998