The first lesson I was taught about drawing was: Don’t draw what you know to be there, draw what you see. We know the hand has four fingers and a thumb, but sometimes fingers hide behind each other, sometimes the thumb clutches into a fist. And, sometimes, that which you know to be there is not: Some hands have fewer than four fingers.
Some hands have more.
I find this to be an approach with many applications. It’s kind of like critical thought: Never assume that something has to be a certain way just because that’s the way things are. Never let yourself see what isn’t there.
Each week I try to write something new, here, for Problem Machine. Ideally I’d like it to be interesting and insightful, and nearly every time I end up with something where I’m unsure whether what I write about is just painfully obvious and trite or is actually incisive and insightful. I’m starting to think that this may, in fact, be a good sign: Insight is often is a matter of saying the obvious, of not seeing that which isn’t there, and sometimes seeing what is. The things we never see are just as often those under our eyes as those over the horizon.
And this, too, seems at once obvious and insightful. The emperor still has no clothes.
There are a few ways this manifests strangely. One of them is that we tend to regard with contempt those truths which are repeated too frequently. We became sick and tired of love and peace. If everyone knows that kindness and gentleness are beneficial, then those who deny kindness and gentleness feel that they have access to a new knowledge of the world, that they are wolves among sheeple.
Trading knowledge for ignorance can feel a lot like learning. It can be hard to tell the difference between forbidden fruit and rotten fruit.
Another odd manifestation is that it becomes extremely easy to sound insightful just by echoing the consensus, whether it’s true or not, whether it’s overlooked or not. Many people become very wealthy on the lecture circuit telling people exactly what they want to hear. It can be hard to tell the difference, then, between what we want to hear and what is true, between what is insightful and what is vapid.
I don’t have an answer to the challenges this poses.
All you can do is keep looking, and try to see what is actually there for yourself.