When people get high positions they are important………
Knowledge is power……..
Or at least that is conventional wisdom at the moment…right?
Let me start with Knowledge is power. Let’s use electricity to illustrate (corny hey). Anyway, lets say power exists in the wall socket(although we know that it comes from the company that produces it and sends it to our sockets). Anyway, the power in the socket. Now….does the power exist in the socket whether you know its there or not?
It still exists there, I hope you agree with me. Therefore knowledge of the power in the wall socket does suddenly make it appear. So power is power and not knowledge. Knowledge about that power simply allows you to harness the power for your specific task (hopefully for good and not evil) Wisdom would help you apply that knowledge to your specific situation.
Second thing I wanted to chat about today, is the means by which most of our world is run today. HIERARCHY and positional structures. This is simply my opinion on this (so no political stance is meant in this)
In a normal family we have a father, mother and children. They grow together and form relationships. Normally good ones and the children grow up into well adjusted individuals. And one would think that we would continue the approach out of the family environment. After all it works and its the natural process.
Yet we don’t follow that in life. No, we apply a different model completely in our companies and ruling organisations. We have removed the need for a relationship. We place people in positions and expect people to respect the position clinically. Presidents, C.E.O.’s, Pastors, Managers, Ministers, Leaders, Supervisors……and the list goes on. Sometimes we will hit the jackpot and strike a good relationship or connection with the respective authorities in our lives, but mostly its quite a painful way of life. It is the most foreign thing to have someone “appointed” as a father to you…..yet we apply these things so glibly in our “outer lives”.
Your position does not warrant importance in life…..relationships foster that. Also respect is given, it cannot be taken or forced.
“But how will we control the large amounts of people”…………Why should we need to control them. I know my thoughts are a bit out there, but if we were brought in a relationship rich lifestyle, we would not need to “be controlled”….
I guess I am simply wanting to know, if knowledge is power…..then why do we sit in a world like we are in now?????? There is not a lack of knowledge.
If our western world is so amazing and our leadership structures are so great, why are people afraid to step out there, why are they unwilling to co-operate with the “appointed” authorities all the time?
Why do we find people who will do “anything to get to the top” by brown nosing the “Boss”.
An environment that thrives on “appointing people” is one that seeks to control. It also leads to a lack of expressing the authentic self, since you have something to lose if you are found to be weak.
If life was built around genuine relationships, then it would be hard for “fake people” to exist……
the Honest One
I wonder if knowledge really is that kind of power. If the knowledge suddenly went away, I think we’d stop functioning, revert to the pre-bronze age stage and then suddenly…. but knowledge doesn’t work like that. It takes a long time to ‘unknow’ something as a society. Disbelieve it, yes. But to actually shut the idea back into forgottenland, very hard. If you cut off the electricity to the house, you know instantly that you’ve lost power. But cutting off the source of knowledge is harder, because the knowledge people had already doesn’t just go away. And knowledge doesn’t work in only a few proscribed ways, the way electricity does. But I get what you’re saying, that the distrust of governments and other authorities indicates an imbalance between knowledge and power somewhere. I think the kinds of knowledge that bring immediate power are more slippery than the kinds of knowledge that bring lasting stability, and we have a little bit of both in our culture.
Hi
I hear you.
I guess if I were forced to make a one liner about knowledge, I would have to commit to say that knowledge empowers…..I am not saying that knowledge is a bad thing or that it should be removed, but merely that we should not ascribe properties to the word which it does not inherently have, what do you think?
I guess this post address two concepts and really should have been two separate posts. But what I am trying to get at is the drive for knowledge has been mankind’s greatest exploit, but really what they wanted was power. Now since they amalgamate the two these days, its hard to differentiate. But knowledge empowers a person who does not know about something (bearing in mind that I do not need to know everything about a car in order to use it). Yet this car has lots of power, my increase in knowledge about how it really works enables me to use it more to what I might need at the time.
I am rambling here, hope that makes some sort of sense?
Thanks for reading and commenting
I’ve been wondering about what you’ve been saying. I can understand the saying that knowledge is power, probably because I grew up with that saying. But when knowledge really becomes power, often an abusive power, is when the pursuit or the imbalance of knowledge by one individual is more than another. It becomes a leverage which could be used against the one not knowing. I think if we all know more then we will all be in a better position to not allow the abuse of that knowledge and to harness it better and for better good. Then positions will be irrelevant because of the pursuit for a common good. But hey, now I’m just being an idealistic, starry eyed boy who believes in fairies and unicorns and Santa Claus 🙂
Since when are fairies and unicorns fantasy???????:)
Essentially I guess what I am trying to say to humanity is, we are going the wrong way…..