Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions ... Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? ... As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it — and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. If you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens.
The problem of groupthink and individual ignorance besets not just ordinary people but also the presidents and CEOs responsible for controlling the world. They may have at their disposal plenty of advisers and vast intelligence agencies, but this does not necessarily make things better. It is extremely hard to discover the truth when you are ruling the world. You are just far too busy. Most political chiefs and business moguls are forever on the run. Yet if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.
Worse still, great power inevitably distorts the truth. Power is all about changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is. When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail; when you have great power in your hand, everything looks like an invitation to meddle. Even if you somehow overcome this urge, the people surrounding you will never forget the giant hammer you are holding. Anybody who talks with you will have a conscious or unconscious agenda, and therefore you can never have full faith in what they say. No sultan can ever trust his courtiers and underlings to tell him the truth.
Great power thus acts like a black hole that warps the very space around it. The closer you get to it, the more twisted everything becomes. Each word is made extra heavy upon entering your orbit, and each person you see tries to flatter you, appease you, or get something from you. They know you cannot spare them more than a minute a two, and they are fearful of saying something improper or muddled, so they end up mouthing either empty slogans or the greatest clichés of all.
If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the center, because the center is built on existing knowledge. The guardians of the old order usually determine who gets to reach the centers of power, and they tend to filter out the carriers of disturbing, unconventional ideas. Of course, they filter out an incredible amount of rubbish too. Not being invited to the Davos World Economic Forum is hardly a guarantee of wisdom. That’s why you need to waste so much time in the periphery: while it might contain some brilliant revolutionary insights, it is mostly full of uninformed guesses, debunked models, superstitious dogmas, and ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Leaders are thus trapped in a double bind. If they remain at the center of power, they will have an extremely distorted vision of the world. If they venture to the margins, they will waste too much of their precious time. And the problem will only get worse. In the coming decades, the world will become even more complex than it is today. Individual humans—whether pawns or kings—will consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, economic currents, and political dynamics that shape the world. As Socrates observed more than two thousand years ago, the best we can do under such conditions is to acknowledge our own individual ignorance.
Excerpts from “21 Lessons For The 21st Century” and “Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species” by Yuval Noah Harari.
A good explanation of what is happening these days. Thank you!
Thank you, very relevant to our current times 🙏