Warning: The following post will contain personal speculations and theories and may at times seem a bit tinfoil-hatty. Proceed with caution.
Lately I've been thinking about the things I want to do with my life. Inevitably I have come to the realization that I will never have time to delve into all the different fields that I'm interested in and that, over time, I have had to jettison several of my dreams in the interest of actually being able to fulfill at least a couple of them. Now I realize that this is all part of life and that the goal of it is to distill my own personal goals and strive towards them. In this process many directions and Ideas will be picked up, analyzed and, in many cases, discarded.
However! Sometimes I have felt bad about some of the compromises I've made. Sometimes I'm left feeling a bit empty. As if somehow I threw away too many of my dreams in order to fulfill a few of them. A lot of it has to do with sliming down my lifestyle and focusing on the core aspects of my current life: School, Work, Church, Friends and Girls. While this makes for a very efficient and goal oriented existence its not a very interesting one. Then I stumbled across this quote and instantly realized where I had gone wrong:
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-Robert A. Heinlein
The times in my life when I have felt like I lived a more interesting and fulfilling life were the times I did a lot of things half bad because I wanted to explore. While the times I've been miserable have been the times I only did a few things, but brilliantly.
We live in a society that celebrates brilliance in the narrow. Athletes devote years of their lives to doing a few specific things better then anyone else. Engineers study for years to become brilliant in their field of study. The salesman hones his skill in handling people in order to convince them to buy things from him. Don't get me wrong. All these are admirable things and brilliance should be celebrated. But there is a side effect:
What of the things we do not specialize in? How many brilliant physicists are left flustered by the subtleties of social interaction? How many athletes are woefully ignorant in the area of personal economy? How many brilliant artists seem to be lacking the basic skills of living a healthy responsible life?
In times of old this sort of thing would not be sustainable as one would have to deal with these problems or face the direct consequences. Today however you simply bring in a qualified expert to handle the area that you don't master. Or in other words, you throw experts and money at the problem until it goes away.
Again, qualifications are a good thing. I certainly want the man removing my appendix to be a certified surgeon, or the man piloting the airplane I'm sitting in to be a certified pilot. Hopefully among the very best at that.
The danger however arises when we hire experts to do our thinking for us. Can we form an opinion on a subject today without being swayed or supported by an expert? How come, during election campaigns, we need experts on TV to analyze and interpret the candidates stances? Are we to lazy to inform ourselves and just proceed to throw an expert at the problem of choosing in order to make it go away? Are we so specialized into a few facets of the human existence that anything outside of it requires an expert to be understood or dealt with? An expert who in his/her turn will have to turn to other experts to handle the areas outside of his/her particular area of expertise.
What if the experts are wrong? What if the expert on TV isn't even a real expert but rather someone chosen specifically to analyze the facts in a way that coincides with the agenda of the broadcasters? What if we start feeling apathetic towards things outside of our specific are of expertise because we do not trust anyone but the experts to be able to make a difference?
This is exactly where a lot of us are today. The western democracies weren't built by scholars and intellectuals who carefully constructed society in a sterile lab environment. They were built by normal, fallible, weak human beings just like us. They didn't always understand every fine detail. They weren't educated in the arts of politics. What they did do was to take control of their own destinies. They informed themselves on as many areas as possible. The rise of the labour movement in europe was combined with a rise of education among the working classes. Not education that the government provided or even approved, but rather education they found themselves, and in large parts created themselves where existing schools wouldn't cover their needs.
Today we are in a situation where the average citizen couldn't get food anywhere but a store if their life depended on it. The large majority are not equipped to deal with the twists life might throw us. In my own case, if I were to find myself in the woods, with no access to civilization and be forced to survive on my own, my expertise in human-machine interaction and principles of design won't do a single thing to help me. Humanity as a whole is being conditioned to turn to an expert rather then to think for themselves. Preferably involving an exchange of money for the experts services. It's almost as if someone really wants us not to even try thinking for ourselves about the world around us.
I know I am guilty of this as much as anyone else. But in order to break this trend I intend to find my way back to my exploring, curious, dreaming and thinking self. To read up on a subject instead of trusting that one sound bite by the expert they had on TV.
There is so much more I could say about this but I feel I am already rambling (some of you will claim I did so from the first word of this post.) I did warn you!
Have a good night and please make sure to do something crazy and random tomorrow that you have long wanted to do but never quite got to.
