I will defend Starbucks with my life

hegel

In Hegel’s system, the Concept (Begriff) isn’t just a mental abstraction; it’s the inner logic or essence of reality itself — and through dialectical development, it actualizes itself. In other words, ideas become real things. The “Idea” realizes itself in the world through contradiction and synthesis, so that history, matter, and consciousness are all expressions of the same rational process coming to know itself.

So when the meme says “Everybody gangsta until concepts become things,” it’s unintentionally summarizing the moment when idealism stops being armchair philosophy and starts manifesting — when thought “incarnates.” In Hegelian terms, that’s Geist (Spirit) externalizing itself and returning to itself through history.

The funny twist is that it’s also what terrifies anti-Hegelians: once concepts are treated as ontologically real — as forces shaping matter and history — you open the door to ideological world-shaping. Marx flipped that same logic on its head, turning it into “materialism,” but kept the Hegelian machinery: ideas concretizing through social structures.

So yeah — the meme’s joke lands on a serious philosophical truth:
everyone’s comfortable in abstraction, until abstraction starts acting back.