DArKnEsS WiThiN LiGhT: Knowledge is power

The saying that little knowledge is a dangerous thing is , to my mind, a very dangerous adage . If knowledge is real and genuine, I don’t believe that it is other than a valuable possession however infinitesimal is quantity may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger .

-- Science and Culture (1877, T.H. Huxley)

It was a dusty morning, both in terms of real and imaginary. Real because I had to inhale the polluted air of delhi and imaginary because again I started my journey on the train without any known destination. While I was looking to the world windows of the of the delhi metro, I looked at a school, some Shishu vidhyalya , with a tag line “Knowledge is power”. Just above this line, there was an advertisement banner of cycle shop, seems like the sponsor of the school. It reminded me of the snippet by Renan J in the book ‘Dialogues et fragments philosophies’ ‘Savior c’est pouviour’est le plus beau mot qu’on ait dit : Means ‘Knowlegde is power’ is the finest idea ever put into words’. Now my mind was trying to find the difference between knowledge and power and the correlation between them.

Then in the evening I met a friend of mine , whom I know from past eight years , and I asked him the same question : difference between knowledge and power. He joined a core designing company from college and then moved to one of the navratan companies of india and currently preparing very hard for Indian Engineering services. His answer of my query “Power is when TTE of railways gives me his seat for my waiting ticket and a traffic police man salutes me when he stops me for checking” and “knowledge is what will help me attain that power” . I was pretty much satisfied by his answer as in his answers I couldn’t find any negativity for others. But when I asked the same query while my dad was telling me a story of an uncle who is a KAS (KAS is ‘Kashmir administrator services’ , a similar exam like IAS) . The story was about the helplessness of the educated officers . So my dad was a kind of supporting this uncle’s acts of corruption because if he doesn’t do that , how he can arrange the parties for the CM or MP’s. Upon my response that arranging parties was not the part of his job , I was given the answer : “If he doesn’t do that, he will lose all his powers.”

So now I again got entangled in the paradox of power and knowledge . If one does what is he certified to do , can that act diminishes his knowledge , if not then how come power. Does power means what has been imparted to him by CM or the higher officials or Power is what he has attained by his knowledge , by his wisdom. I am sorry , as I know “knowledge” and “wisdom” are not the same.

By this time , the knowledge I have gained by my friend and by my dad , shows me that Henry Kissinger words were correct “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” and words of Crisp Quentin “I expect that rape and murder , either separately or mixed together ,fill the fantasies of most men and all stylists. They are the supreme acts of ascendancy over others; they yields the only moments when a man is certain beyond all doubt that his message has been received. Of the few who live out these dreams, some preface rape with murder so as to avoid embracing a partner who might criticize their techniques”.

I know most of you have not understood my thoughts and I can assure you that I am also in the queue. Few minutes back I cleaned an old bag where I found Ramana Maharishi’s book “Self realization”. I picked and started reading it in random. Its gist (in my own words: not quoted by Ramana Maharishi or anyone) was “Inner knowledge i.e knowledge of the self gives you an ultimate power of creation and destruction. Since the whole universe exists because we believe it exits. Universe becomes a quantum space when we sleep. By quantum space , I mean a space where no dimensions of the world works , you die , people die , you met friends and foes , you kill , you bury sadness , you fly and you cry (of course you can say all this happens in real world also so what’s the difference in real and dream land . All I can say is it’s just a thin layer between conscious and unconscious world). So when we wake up that whole quantum space vanishes and next time, it will be different. Self knowledge gives you the power of non attachment, which makes you see the world as deciphered in the movie ‘Inception’. ”

At least this definition of power and knowledge was something understandable by me. But still the definitions of the knowledge and power given by friend and parents were not wrong. They are the revised definitions, in our language definitions 2.0 which says “Knowledge is what gave you the power to set the controls over the Sun” “Gather as much knowledge as you need to save your asses and it becomes power” “ Knowledge is the certificate of the power” And power is , in hitler’s words “Deutschland wird entweder Weltmacht oder uberhaupt nicht sein : Means Germany will either be a world power or will not exist at all [Mein Kamph 1927]”

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

-- Conjectures and Refutations(1963)