Goethe warned about the dangers of speed when the fastest man-made things on the planet were trains and steam ships.
He saw this tendency as early as the 19th Century, when he grew concerned that the speed of life (railways, steamships etc.) made communication so rapid that people lost the art of simplicity.
They became over-educated and yet increasingly mediocre.
The pace of life led to a dislocation between themselves and the outside world. The result was that people got “stirred up” too early in life and “carried away” by the “whirl of the times”.
His point was that being stirred up and carried away in a whirl meant you lost yourself in the process. More information, more communication, yet greater mediocrity. We can see this danger in the Information Age – a flood of information, yet less and less wisdom, vision, understanding.
Goethe saw that speed was becoming more and more important and that it was dizzying and disorienting. Being caught up and carried away means you are not in control – you are being swept along by forces you do not see or understand.
· More speed – less thought.
· More speed – less reflection.
· More speed – less conscious direction in life.
· More speed – less balance.
Quality suffers in every area of life. Something we can relate to in our throw-away, mass-produced-in-China world.
“No-one knows himself any longer” he said. Learning does not advance you anymore because the world overtakes the speed at which you can learn and by the time you’ve learned how something works, it’s changed. So you lose yourself. Then what tends to happen is you get out of touch and isolated. You feel as if you are not at home in the world.
He also thought that because of this, anyone who digs deep within will find out that he is only “half a being” who sees less and is blinder than he thought.
How much faster is the world whirling now that it did in 1825? Goethe could not possibly have imagined the pace at which we live our lives today – yet, and this is true of great thinkers – he saw it long before anyone else did.
And because things happen faster today, his words are even more true today than they were when he wrote them.
Wealth Insight
Take the time to reach back to the truths he saw back then, which was a message for the modern world, perhaps we can begin to know ourselves again. Which is a crucial aspect of becoming a successful Wealth Creator.
1 comment:
I wonder if Goethe factored in that we would be able to abstract certain things (no need to care about how they worked bur rather that they do and we can now use them) and so get more done with less concern for finer details of mundane things, or that our brains are capable of so much more than we realise! Either way there is a singularity in this scenario, at what point do we reach overload and what will be the consequences.
Trevor
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