The Sum of Human Knowledge

It doesn’t take a village to know the truth.

The truth comes from facts. Facts will form into concepts, and concepts can identify truths of reality via the use of logic.

Any individual has the capacity for discerning truth, provided he or she takes the trouble to think. Your brain is like a car. A car can be a useful and wonderful thing, but only if you make the choice to turn on the ignition — and keep focusing while you drive.

Thinking is not, and by definition cannot be, a group act. Two heads are sometimes better than one, but only if each one of those two heads is operating as a single, thinking unit. There is no collective consciousness (or unconsciousness), and two minds cannot function as one. Nor can a thousand, or a million.

Nobody can do your thinking for you. This is true whether the thinking involves what to buy at the grocery store, or how to solve a complex mathematical equation — or anything in between.

You can benefit from the thinking of others, particularly in important matters of scientific or technical specialization. Proof of that is all around us. But the sum of human knowledge is still individual, at the root. Some think of more important things than others, and the rest of us disproportionately benefit.

Knowledge is not collective. All knowledge is obtained and absorbed on an individual basis — one mind at a time.

We’re taught by the priests, the ministers, the rabbis, the university professors and the politicians that groups are the means to truth. “It takes a village,” they tell us, in one form or another.

They’re wrong. It doesn’t take a village to know the truth. It only takes a single, thinking mind.

 

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