fms july 2017

Friend, think of yourself as a wise person.

Why?!

You become wise when you step away from yourself as a condition-express, and speak your thoughts, your doubts, and your own and others’ experience of living. And, listen, we can all do this but fail to, as we do not think of ourselves as being knowledgable enough.

Maybe we are in search of the knowledgable.

Oh idiot! If you do not think of yourself as being knowledgable, then how will you admire the knowledge of others? And how will you be able to distinguish if you are hearing someone express wisdom or merely self-interest cloaked in seductive language?

So you mean wisdom and self-interest are different orders of thinking?

Try a thought experiment. Think of something that you consider wise. Then check how close, or far, you find it from your self-interest.

Listening to you both I sense a tension. I would like to understand. To me the clash is actually between intelligence of specialised expertise and wisdom. Take for example lawyers and managers. We gauge them via their special expertise. Sure, before some, our capacity to weigh weakens.

Thanks sister! I was struggling to think on this. ‘Specialised expertise intelligence’ is such a clear formulation. And yes, it overlaps and is in conflict with, irritates, opposes, displaces our wisdom of living. This passes through every body.

Maybe this is the reason that when someone says to me, ‘you are ignorant’, it hurts. It feels like I have failed to give a sense of who I am.

I remember an event. In some factories, workers were given wages to write for three days.

Wow! This is an exciting change. Many people in the world get wages to think and write, and we hear they have production targets to measure their thinking. Anyway, this trickle down is encouraging.

What did they write?

They did not write on any specific topic. They made no show of their specific expertise. They drifted far from their condition. They did not write any petition. They did not write a pamphlet.

Then what is left to write?!!

Thought sparks for conversation between the wise. They went far from self-interest. There was a fragrance of rebellion. Some couplets. Some skies. Some unknown worlds. Some song lines.

Then what happened?

Word of these sparks spread to many factories and many places, and there is mounting excitement.

This is exactly what I was saying. These knowledge sparks and their spread loosens the grip of specialised expertise and its manifold capture of thought.

This wisdom, these knowledge sparks, are built over time through dense networks of life. They extend over generations, exceed locations, move between earth and sky, between friends, through workplaces, and also through night buses.

I need to write this conversation down. It’s got complicated. The idea that wisdom and knowledge are with everyone, and traverse time and place, in constant attrition with specialised knowledge—I need to examine this.

We will meet you here in your auto again soon. And we’ll bring along some friends who got entrapped in the snare of specialised knowledge and lost their jobs. This needs some discussing together.

Of course, my friend. Anytime.

Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (Faridabad Workers’ News)
Issue # 349
July 2017

Page 1: The Conflict of Wisdom and Expert Intelligence
Page 2: Many utterances amidst conversations with many
Page 3: Commoning; Travelled so many paths
Page 4: Experiences from MESL and Boni Polymer; From NOIDA; Conversation at Naharpool.

PDF enclosed.

Contributions welcome

We currently print 16,000 copies at the monthly print cost of Rs. 14,000/-. We are able to meet this through contributions. To sustain us, you can send a bank transfer. Please write to us, and we will send you the bank details.

Fms July 2017 by baatein1 on Scribd