Knowledge is Power?

Happy_Killbot

@BrainSocks Caring bout people and having power go hand in hand. What would make you assume that they do not?

Knowledge is power because capabilities grants and defines power, while the only way to gain new capabilities is through the application of understanding and information.

Knowledge of course, has a social component, it is not limited to just inventions and complex abstract thought. In fact, if you look at the most powerful people, they are almost exclusively social geniuses. That is to say they understand people and crowds and know how to interact with individuals to get what they want. It is because of this knowledge that they are powerful.

In other fields, the same is true. If we are talking about literal power, as in electrical energy, then the correlation is obvious. In order to make power, you have to know how to build power generators and distribute it.

If we are talking about wealth, then there is both a strong social component combined with some practical capability, such as manufacturing or a service someone can sell. This requires knowledge to be effective.

What you do with that power, has nothing to do with how it is obtained. If you chose to "stab people in the back" that isn't going to get you very far, because it will only make you enemies who may seek revenge. This method is only useful from a Machiavellian perspective, where your allies may turn into a liability, in which case they are not eliminated because you don't care for them, but rather because they may try to overthrow or otherwise limit your power. In a democracy, this isn't a problem because power is more evenly distributed, so people have to work together.

In many instances, getting power relies on supporting people and getting them to a point where they will be willing to do your biding willfully, forced consent is not consent at all.

No matter what, knowledge is power and how you use that power is irrelevant to that fact.

MayCaesar

In order to be able to cultivate the sense of belonging and caring about one another without constantly worrying about dying in one of thousands horrible ways, knowledge is needed. We have not always lived like we do today, when you can go outside and say "Hi" to any of the millions strangers in a large city without any consequences. For the vast majority of human history, we were warring beasts, living in small tribes and fighting everyone and everything else to the death. Overcoming that part of our history has become possible as a result of both technological and cultural evolution, and both fundamentally rest on the ability to acquire and process knowledge.

People tend to romanticise the past. You see many people nowadays saying, "We have lost human connection. Everyone is sitting behind the screen or typing something on the phone. No meaningful interaction is left. Back in my day..." Forgetting that it was not until as recently as 30 years ago that this planet was essentially a large war zone, with East Bloc and dozens regimes allied with it terrorising the global population and initiating constant conquest wars. Or that up until around 150 years ago the word "telephone" did not exist, and if you wanted to interact with someone living 1000 miles away from you, you had no choice but to take an ugly horse-driven carriage and travel for 10 days to see them in person.

As I see it, human interaction in the modern world is of the highest quality it has ever been, and just because some minor things such as mobile phones can work as a distraction from that interaction sometimes, on the whole we are closer connected to each other than ever before.

Think about how many opportunities we have to form human connections. Want to find a date? Pull up your phone and load up one of the dozens apps, and in a few minutes you are already talking to someone who is using the same app. Want to meet with new people with common interests? Load up meetup.com, and you have immediate access to thousands groups of people with those exact interests. Want to talk to your parents who are living on the other end of the planet? It takes only 20 seconds to load up Skype and connect.

It is simply unbelievable how far we have come. Even 20 years ago the communication capabilities we have today were from the realm of very daring science fiction. Imagine what they will be like 20 years from now...

My point is that knowledge is what made all this possible in the first place, as such it is paramount and more primary and important than the other things you classified as important.