Homepage

Knowledge doesn't always make you wise

Do you remember Huey, Dewey and Louie, those three little wise guys from Duckburg who were the nephews of Donald and Dagobert Duck? They had their "Junior Woodchucks Guidebook" that told them everything they needed to know. Like how to cook turkeys using the frictional heat in the atmosphere. How to make nasty creatures disappear using a teleporter. And how to make bread and butter without butter. Basically everything you need to know to get by in the mythical world of Duckburg.

And now we have our own pocket guidebook, which is even smaller, more practical - and it has an answer for everything. The "BlackBerry" is a special type of mobile phone that gives us access to the wonderful world of Google, and better still the collective wisdom and limitless intelligence of billions of websites that have an answer for every question, just by pressing two or three buttons. A godsend in this tough world in which we live. Gone are the days of making mistakes due to ignorance; this tiny pocket device can navigate us through the difficult situations in life, just like the little book showed the ducks the way out of the jungle and danger zones. There are no more excuses, the uninitiated only have themselves to blame, they are just being reckless. Stupidity will be punished. Which means a future financial crisis is out of the question.

Or is stupidity perhaps something other than ignorance? Huey, Dewey and Louie always took what the book said, and certainly what their know-it-all Uncle Donald told them, with a pinch of salt. If they were in any doubt, they believed what they saw with their own eyes rather than what others told them. They knew that knowledge doesn't necessarily make you wise. What's funny is that the knowledge in the archives is always yesterday's news, but life is happening today, and there is something new happening all the time. We deal in situations, and every situation is unique, so it doesn't matter how much knowledge we have accumulated, it won't necessarily help us. Which is why we ended up in the current financial mess. The bankers followed a risk formula into which had been fed all the relevant data from the last fifty years - but which didn't include the impoverished US homeowners who were left out in the real world. The bankers should have looked out of the window once in a while.

The mobile phone is still a useful guidebook, as long as you still use your common sense. If you don't, the same applies as before the days of the BlackBerry: you can be a walking encyclopaedia and still be a fool.

Ludwig Hasler