This blog is part of a series. WTF is social? Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle, impact our ability to be socially effective.
We are not equipped with natural apparatus to make sense of markets or states or taxation or economics or law or even media. The social animal functions not by knowing but by knowing who knows and can he be trusted. The more knowledge we create, more idiots we become relatively to each other, lesser becomes our common knowledge. May be there is some truth in the Bible story: eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge may be leading us on to a dangerous path.
Just like we have limits to number of people we can know, may be there is a limit to all the knowledge we can save in our heads. Learning and discovery of new knowledge are time consuming. All knowledge which is not social is learned at the cost of social. If everyone is busy seeking knowledge and no-one is maintaining the social relationships, the "knowledge" we gained is useless, because we forgot to maintain "we". Society needs to keep itself together before anything else. It is not surprising that simplifying something and making it accessible to the world at large is so much in demand all the time. It connects the "knowledge" with the rest of us, giving us a great multipliers like: wheel or fire or numbers or vaccines etc.
Sorry to all the economists but Adam Smith was misguided. Specialisation is what bring efficiency to the society but the pure pursuit of efficiency makes it less of a society and hence vulnerable. The irony is that systems are the main cause of systematic risk and all economists and social architects do is build systems.
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