Thursday, July 06, 2017

A quote

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ―  Voltaire

3 comments:

Anony said...

But then who do we believe? :-/

I think we are at the mercy of influential opinion makers (be it celebrities, politicians, or journalists). Experts do their job just fine, but (unprofessional) mediators imbue the findings with their own interpretations, which is ultimately fed to us. I wish we could just cut the middlemen and experts assume the additional responsibility of communicating their knowledge effectively. Otherwise feeling disillusioned one might categorize even expert's advice as absurdities!

Quoting Will Durant: "The function of professional teacher should have been to meditate between the specialist and the nation, to learn the specialist language as the specialist had learned nature's, in order to break down the barriers between knowledge and need, and find for new truths old terms that all literate people might understand. For if knowledge becomes too great for communication, it would degenerate into scholasticism and the weak acceptance of authority, mankind would slip into a new age of faith, worshiping at a respectful distance its new priests."

... and nowadays I guess people have begun to rebel against scientific priesthood. Like voting for Br-exit despite economist/statisticians warnings against it. Hope no one invokes this quote of Laplace while challenging scientific priesthood! :D

Anony said...

*typo: quote of Voltaire

mystic-soul said...

Anony: Wholeheartedly in agreement with you. Pseudo-intellectuals and corrupt anchors in the media are the worst enemy of the society.

Humans are strange in a way that they defy all norms and expectations!!!

Thank you for such a thoughtful comment.