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Democracies, with their noisy public spaces, have always been especially prone to challenges to established knowledge. Actually, they’re more prone to challenges to established anything: it’s one of the characteristics that makes them “democratic.” Even in the ancient world, democracies were known for their fascination with change and progress. Thucydides, for example, described the democratic Athenians of the fifth century b.c. as a restless people “addicted to innovation,” and centuries later, St. Paul found that the Athenians “spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.” This kind of restless questioning of orthodoxy is celebrated and protected in a democratic culture.
The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols
People fear that being trapped inside a box, they will miss out on all the wonders of the world. As long as Neo is stuck inside the matrix, and Truman is stuck inside the TV studio, they will never visit Fiji, or Paris, or Machu Picchu. But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or travelling to Fiji won’t make any difference. It’s not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign ‘Open only in Fiji!’ and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji. And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings for ever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world; even inside the matrix.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari
So there is no such thing as having potential. Or rather, there is, but it doesn’t mean anything. Or rather, it doesn’t mean anything beyond being a human. To say that you have potential means simply that you have the capacity to learn, and grow, and get better, like every other human. Unfortunately, this won’t reveal anything about precisely where you can learn, and grow, and get better, or how, or how fast, or under what conditions. Potential, like being human, doesn’t tell us anything about what particular human you are, or what direction would be best for your sort of human in the future. And, of course, if having potential is just being a human, then we can’t rate you on it. We can’t split our company up into hi-po’s and lo-po’s, any more than we can rate you on your human-ness and give the most stuff to those who are most human and the least to those are who least human.
Nine Lies About Work
Marcus Buckingham, Ashley Goodall
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