The more I tried to understand the world the more complex it got. But before I started to seek how really things happen I used to think that I am too stupid and ignorant to know everything or anything which my older siblings knew. That’s why I respected them. As I was seeing things with a different point of view unlike the people I was surrounded with I started to realize the difference between intelligence and stupidity. I started to understand why some people are the way they are. I was starting to know why some people are rich and the others poor. Why people behave differently. Why people think differently. Why people care about different things. Later is come to realize the difference between understanding the world and knowing everything. People say that one single person can never know everything and I agree with the thought. But I don’t believe knowing everything is any valuable. May be because it’s not possible. Does it matter if a single person knows every fact in the world? And can memorize tons of books.
There is difference between knowing how to do it step by step and actually having the skill to do it in the real world. There are things that require different amount of knowing and skills. Now the first thought come is my mind after write the last sentence is ‘knowing everything has become of less value because of the digital technologies which can memorize all the stuff and are getting better day by day in skills and tasks which are next to impossible for humans to do the way machine do things.’ But again I asked myself is my claim timely or universal. I think our digital age has very less to do with this. Even before the computer age knowing everything makes very little things happen.
Because even if someone claims to be the most intelligent person in the world, knows everything darn thing in the world and can do anything will not be able make all the change, improvement, transformation that the world needs. There’s a limit to everything. Why? Because she (or he or the other) is a human.
( Nothing can be more elementary and universal than the fact that choices of all kinds in every area are always made within particular limits. For example, when we decide what to buy at the market, we can hardly ignore the fact that there are limits on how much we can spend. The ‘budget constraint,’ as economists call it, is omnipresent. The fact that every buyer has to make choices does not indicate that there is no budget constraint, but only that choices have to be made within the budget constraint the person faces. What is true in elementary economics is also true in complex political and social decisions.’ – Amartya Sen)
Humans have only two hands, two legs, one mind, one heart, one body which cannot be omnipresent. And the most important humans are mortal, they have very limited time compared to work of changing the world in order to make it perfect which might never end (or who knows it can end). Knowing everything isn’t worth less its just more impossible. I don’t know any person who knows everything so I can’t write about the consequences in concrete words, I can only imagine. But it’s worth imagining. In fact right now I am going to change my mind and say that knowing everything is far more valuable than I wrote before. It’s just that human are not to know or memorize the past and present to do the routine stuff presented in front of them but to understand the past and the present to imagine the future and the next thing of the present. That’s why humans created computers and nature created humans.
Now let me come to the understanding part. Understanding is not about knowing every step in the world but to thinking what to do next, the difference between right and wrong, to feeling things. When you know everything or anything you don’t understand it, it just has to be memorized properly. But when you understand something you will be able to imagine what to next. That’s the difference. It’s far more complicated than I used to think before. But thankfully I didn’t gave up there. I have to confess that the more I dig deeper the more I feel that there’s something very important that I am missing – this is what a part of my mind thinks. The other part of my mind says that I understood everything there is. This is the end. Nothing more is left to consider (very specifically). It’s very important to realize the difference between ‘need to understand all’ and ‘want to understand all there is’. There are infinite stuff in our mind imagine and are unresolved. But is there a need to resolve them all. We need to sort out the most urgent and most important thing to resolve in this world because we have limited ‘everything’.
I cannot write everything at once. If I even tried to give justice to all my thoughts and questions pop up in my mind while writing I might never stop writing till forever ( maybe there is an end to something if I am able to consider everything there is to consider). Here it seems that it’s a virtue that I am human not an immortal vampire. The world is not just complicated, its complex.
I’ll continue from here later.
Thanks for reading.
shubh bhatia 