It was in my teens that I first
read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and came
face-to-face with his “law” which states that “The number of hypotheses that
can fit a given set of facts is infinite”. The statement was anathema for a
budding young math and science person. If it was correct, it meant that both those
fields of inquiry were going nowhere fast. Fast-forward to school at the
University of Murdoch where my Vietnamese mathematical genius friend Duong Pham
and I were taking a course in “Structure, Thought and Reality”. That was where
we both first got to know about Thomas Kuhn, Immanuel Kant, Naom Chomsky and
other such philosophers of science (We had both already gotten waist deep in
the incompleteness theorems of the philosopher of mathematics Kurt Gödel before
we got there). Discussing, collating, correlating and analyzing was (and is)
the great and honorable exercise of all academics and career achievers of worth
and we were no different back them.
So, Doung and I were in the habit
of hitting the school pub to discuss outcomes after each class as well as the
voracious back reading we did to understand how the world worked both in
general as well as when viewed through the lenses of mathematics and science. One
cloudless, blameless day, as we sat there discussing Khun over a beer, he
happened to casually say to me (paraphrased), “you know Jun, around 200,000
math discoveries are made each year by masters and doctoral students. Each is
seen by about 6 members of the student’s friends and family list who don’t
understand a word of it and read by about six people on the student’s thesis
defense team who actually understand it and hopefully, give the student the
sort-after degree. No surprise that the rediscovery rate is greater than 70%”.
That was a shocking revelation that brought home to me the sheer uselessness of
our 400 year old education system and its utter waste of human effort, money
and resources.
How many of us actually use any
of the learning we absorb after years of what is tantamount to forced labor in
our various portals of education? In my years of life, I’ve seen very few whose
life work can be directly linked to the education leading to their degrees. If what we slave over is useless, then the
immediate next question we must ask ourselves is “why do this?”.
Well, since at the highest level,
higher education is largely useless, I must reluctantly recognize that its
importance is merely cosmetic. You see, it is fashionable to have a degree or
three. It doesn’t really matter if its owner is actual a master or doctor of
the skill area that he or she claims lordship over. There is a general
perception that they are people of some account. However, if we take a step
back and look at the conduct of millions of these people proudly armed with
their diplomas, we must understand an inconvenient truth – quite a lot of these
folks have no clue about anything at all.
The best proof of this is that if
they were of any worth, our world would not be in the place it is. A place
where our doctors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, financiers, businesspeople,
policy makers and leaders have actually managed to retrograde development and
bring us to our knees. Pandemics, epidemics, development disasters, natural
disasters, money market crises, food crises, climate crises – all point to that
uncomfortable conclusion. Looking back over the sum total of human effort in
the last century or so, I have to affirm that most of the things that actually
eased the burden of life on people were things created by people who never saw
the insides of a university. Diplomas were never the reason why they did what
they did and their effort was based on accomplishing something good for
the world – not achieving something that was only of good to the
industry that overarches all other industries – the social-fashion industry and
its attended manufacturing of a vote for things that are mostly made of
air.
It is not their fault. They
acquire these three letter dirty words because they feel that those will give
them stability, position, recognition, money, power and acceptance in the
world. Hitherto, to a large extent, that, indeed, has been the case. However,
the world is now well past the time when it can be satisfied with gaseous
diplomas or window-dressing degrees. Those bought us a world of fear and alarm.
Now, knowledge has necessarily taken precedence over learning and Insight has
taken precedence over education. Hanging above it all, wisdom has become the great
need of the day and folks, wisdom comes from getting one’s hands muddied in
this kickass reality we call the world.
On that matter, I can share some
great, positive news with you. Wisdom doesn’t require us to pass the O’Level or
the A’Level or get degrees or masters or PhDs or post-docs. It can be acquired
by all regardless of the social, economic or academic sub-stratum to which they
belong. It is the outcome of a kind of self-service where the effort is worthy
because it a) is part of a greater collective effort, b) is simple,
responsible, replicable and useful and c) requires no validation or adoption by
anyone.
A wise person is generally not a scientific
person or career person. Nor is he or she a discussing, arguing, researching, collating,
correlating, analyzing person. Those are things that are the vacuous mainstream
indulgences of people who, hell bent on getting an education for a living, have
completely lost contact with life. Wise people will take time off to grow a
chillie plant in a pot instead of complaining that the price of chillies is
Rs.1,600 a kilo. They will have a small composting bin on their balcony and not
be the cause of the Meethotamulla disaster. They will have a solar panel on
their rooftops instead of screaming at CEB tariffs. They will switch off their
lights instead of railing at power cuts. They will use public transport at
non-peak hours and weekends instead of howling about congestion. In short, they
are problem solving people not problem-complaining people or problem-contributing
people and as they proceed down this road, they acquire greater and greater
insight into the working of the world. Insight that is impossible for the PhD
holding specialists and qualified career people who naively believe that they
are worth something when they are not.
Twenty nine years ago, as I
studied Duong over that pitcher of beer, I said (paraphrased) “The
intellectuals are able, only. The intellectually intelligent are enabled, only.
The intellectually intelligently creative are knowledgeable, only. The
intellectually intelligently creatively emotionally stable are wise and Doung
wisdom cannot be if we are thrilled by our intellect, intelligence, creativity,
mental stability and what it can personally give us in this world ”.
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