Knowledge is Overrated
Through the years of learning in kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, form 6 and now finally in college, I've found myself baffled by the term of "knowledge is power". This terms is coined in such a way it seems that knowledge is everything and our whole lives should be focused on attaining this precious essence that is, on a daily basis, increasing more and more.
I've read text after text, book after book, encyclopedia after encyclopedia, listened to rant after rant, and then finally heard success story after success story in order to come to one conclusion: knowledge is definitely not power. Though, the history of the creation of the analogy of "knowledge is power" lies within our past social rules and access to knowledge.
It started with the great debate halls in greece, or even perhaps from the stone age or maybe in the birth of the written word. However, the catalyst to the sudden increase of development in human knowledge started from the invention of the written word, in other words - language. Knowledge used to be limited only to the people in power and only the rich managed to attain enough wealth to own books and tomes. Although in the age of the Rennaissance and Reformation, mass printing of books took place, libraries and academic resources were still privately owned and not open to the public. In addition, the people allowed to access these vast archives were those of the "select few" who were deemed worthy of weilding this type of knowledge. These "select few" were indefinitely philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Leonardo Da Vinci. One must make not that these individuals all possessed a higher sense of great understanding in the knowledge that they had attained. Thus, the term of "knowledge is power" was very appropriate at those times because the only people being able to access knowledge were those with outstanding understanding of metaphysical laws or scholars of high regard and education.
It was not until Abraham Lincoln created the "open library", where resources were open to public, much like the libraries that we have in modern society, that the term "knowledge is power" started to dissolve into doubt. Knowledge became open to everyone, and since the implementation of schools and education by law, the literacy rate among humans increased tremendously if compared to those of the classic era.
To further state my point, I must first state the difference between the terms of "knowledge" and "intelligence". Knowledge is the amount of information you have, basically a person with a lot of knowledge is said to be "smart". Although the word "smart" has been used in a much wider perspective in layman speech, it was originally coined to represent a person with a large amount of knowledge. Being "intelligent" is being "wise", to which a person manages to understand the knowledge that is attained. One would argue that both processes are linked and take place at the same time, thus they are the same process. But I must argue that statement because there are some people who know a tremendous amount of information but do not have nimble enough minds to make any sense of it.
People who seem to know a lot are able to recall much information, however it takes things to another level whether people are able to use that information and apply it to context. That is where intelligence comes in. While perceiving the internal dynamics of intelligence, I referred to items such as the IQ tests, chess and other complexed mind puzzles. I found that one key element was being able to "understand" the complexed processes that were present in each of these items. For example: an IQ tests may test on a lot of different knowledge, however it is not made in a way that will make the questions all seem similar. Instead, they will seek to test the individual on analogies that use the same pattern. To correctly determine the answers to these analogies, one must first understand analogy to determine the pattern that is being used. Similar in chess and other mind games, one must first understand the rules and then develop strategies to reach the goal of each game.
However, I stumbled when I though of another scenario in the same context of using those items. Although each game has a similar goal, an individual had to use practicality to adapt to the many different patterns that may be used. For example: an analogy is basically relating two items on a similar pattern. Though, a very intelligent person would not only be able to relate to the same pattern used, but also different patterns used in other variations of analogies; sometimes even coming up with their own analogies with new patterns - creativity! As in a chess game, there are 3 main stages that are the opening, mid-game and end game. Each stage consists of its own complexed patterns but all leading to the end result - checkmate. As a chess player myself, I've memorised 2 main openings namely the Siccilian opening and King Gambit opening. These are just openings and even at this stage I find that I must adapt the moves to counteract with my opponents moves that has at least 10 different possibilities. However, that is only counting the next move. In a game of chess, I normally count from 5-10 moves ahead, this brings an even larger sets of possibilities in the moves. I found that the fact that I could accurately spot the strategy of my opponent and achieve victory was not only based on mere understanding of the game.
From this, I clearly saw that knowledge was not most basic function of human intellectual superemacy. It was also clear to me that although knowledge was derived from much understanding, there was something else that understanding was derived from. I determined a hypothetical function that allowed us to connect information together and make sense of it, to be the source of understanding. However, that seemed very similar to human perception and cognition. Both these two terms could not give the sense of "power" used in the context of "Knowledge is power", because both perception and cognition are based on levels and knowledge is basically a "you have it or you don't have it" sort of item, similar to understanding. Then, I stumbled onto the term "common sense". This aroused much interest because it managed to encompass the underlying techniques used in the game of chess that mere understanding could not. Common sense was a dictation of a certain ability to think in a way that could bring sense and connectivity to happenings and situations. Strategies were devised from this common sense because it focused on very real issues. Plus, understanding could be derived from common sense as well. One needed a common denominator, for example a base of human language, and also a certain intuitive "sense" to achieve understanding. Though, this concept is a hypothesis that I have come up with and I am still striving to find factual evidence that something with the characteristic of "common sense" exists and it is not merely human cognition. Or perhaps there is yet another mediator between this "common sense" that I have described between cognition, which might prove to be the basic source to human intellect. This is because there is clearly something more to understanding that allows human beings to have a sort of instantaneous intuition leading to the forming0 of new ideas. Currently I am running along the lines of imagination and abstract thought.
Thus, so far I have defined that "Knowledge is not power", but one may clearly claim the more accurate analogy of "Understanding is power, knowledge is overrated."
Without understanding, you would still be worthless even if you had all the knowledge in the world. You would be able to explain nothing.
You are still without substance.
Vacuous.
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