Lesson: You’ll never be able to understand everything about how the world works—and that’s OK, as long as you recognize your ignorance and don’t overestimate your knowledge.
In order to find truth, you must recognize what you know—and what you don’t know. Modern society has an incredible amount of information at its fingertips, yet, individually, people know far less than their ancestors. In the Stone Age, hunter-gatherers knew how to hunt, make fire, and escape predators. Today, individuals don’t need the same breadth of knowledge because they have access to a global network of collective knowledge and others’ expertise.
Our ability to access collective knowledge has been critical to humankind’s incredible progress and achievements—but it’s also led to two dangerous phenomena:
Corporate and political leaders are even more susceptible to groupthink, because they’re so busy ruling that they don’t have the time to reexamine issues and reach independent conclusions. In order to truly evaluate a belief and to come up with new insights, you need the opportunity to waste time. You must have time to come up with and sift through many new ideas—including many dead-ends—in order to hit on something insightful.
Besides being short on time, leaders also have the burden of power, which warps their perception of truth. First, when you have power, your perspective naturally skews to find ways to use your power—and your justification for using power may not always reflect the truth. Even if you are judicious about wielding your power, those around you will try to sway you to use it for their benefit. Second, leaders typically reach a position of power because they strongly represent the views of the group. The powerful people who surround leaders are invested in maintaining the order based on those existing views, not questioning them and jeopardizing social structures.
The dangers of groupthink and the knowledge illusion will become more severe as the 21st century progresses. Technology, the economy, and global politics will become increasingly complex, individuals’ understanding will continue to shrink, and—as we discussed—the stakes will continue to rise. While it’s unrealistic for individuals to try to close their knowledge gaps, the best they can do is to acknowledge their ignorance and act with humility.
Like morality and ethics, humans’ sense of justice developed during the times of ancient hunter-gatherer societies. Human codes of right and wrong were developed to suit small communities of a few hundred people in a small geographic area—and they don’t translate seamlessly to our modern world of millions of people across the globe.
Justice requires an understanding of cause and effect, which was much simpler in ancient times. In the Stone Age, if you stole your neighbor’s food, the effect of the theft was immediate and apparent: The neighbor and her family would go to sleep hungry that night. By contrast, most of the injustices in the modern world are embedded in systems and structures—such as systems of politics and trade—which makes it almost impossible to know all of the consequences of your seemingly small actions. For example, you may think you’re innocently shopping for groceries and clothes, while others blame you for participating in an inhumane system of food production and perpetuating child labor in sweatshops halfway across the world. It’s almost impossible to know whether or not you’re doing wrong, because the global system in which we live does wrong on your behalf and without your awareness.
Some people argue that individuals’ intentions should be the measure of their morality: If they meant no harm and didn’t know they were doing anything wrong, then you can’t blame them for it. However, many of the greatest atrocities in human history were facilitated by people who were ignorant of their supporting roles. For example, the post office managers in 1930s Germany may have had no intention of aiding genocide, yet their work was vital to the distribution of Nazi propaganda and recruitment.
Even if people make an effort to understand the effects of their actions, the tangled interconnectedness of the modern world is far too complex to fully grasp. Hunter-gatherers developed the ability to comprehend conflicts between individuals, within small communities, and among tribes—but humans’ brains haven’t evolved to grasp justice on a global scale. At the same time, humans’ interconnectedness makes mutual understanding more important than ever before.
When a problem gets too big and complicated to grasp, people often use one of four shortcuts to attempt to understand it:
Since humans often can’t understand and address complicated issues as individuals, people could turn to their communities to work together to make sense of the world—but this approach leads to its own problems. A community can tackle an issue within the community, but when the problems stretch beyond the community, attempts to understand are likely to lead to biased groupthink. In order to address the global problems we face, we need a global community to work together to understand them.