Influencer Chronicles: Your Social Media Following

Acharya Prashant: If there is a problem in physics, mathematics, or engineering in front of you and somebody offers you a particular solution, do you just go to the last step and accept the conclusion? Is that scientific or rational? Do we do that? No, we don’t do that. What do we do? If a conclusion has been offered to us, the conclusion is the last thing we focus on. What do we focus on? We focus on the process; we focus on the assumptions that the problem solver is making.

Have you started, for example, with a hypothesis? Have you made the hypothesis explicit or are you just hiding your assumptions? Then in the problem-solving mechanism, there are let’s say 21 steps involved, assuming a simple kind of problem. Is each step of the problem logically related to the previous and next one? Or is it so that step number 12 is disconnected to step 11 and something totally unrelated comes up at step number 13 and we accept it?

How does one step follow from the preceding one? When we are solving problems in academics or wherever this is the way we proceed. And if we don’t proceed this way, we know what happens. The problem does not really get solved, the solution won’t work. If you have written for example a computer program, it won’t compile, it won’t run. If you have tried to solve a problem in mathematics, the solution would be false or unattainable.

Worst still, there is often an evaluator who will mark you zero on your solution. Why? Because he will be able to see through your thinking by looking at the various steps you are following. But when it comes to an influencer, often the medium of consumption is the video, is that true? And the pace at which the solution is delivered is quite fast. Often it is deliberately kept fast and we do not have time to pause and think over what has been said.

Equally, the video medium offers you an opportunity to simply press the pause button, does it not? Why do you allow the influencer to run away with whatever he wants to serve you? Make him halt, ask him, “So this is what you just said.” And it was a short sentence of let’s say just eight words. I want to question you here. He’ll want to simply hop over. He’ll want to quickly jump to the next thing. You shouldn’t allow him to go to the next sentence if the previous one itself has not been justified or established.

Can I go to the next step of solving a problem in differential calculus when the previous one itself is faulty? And forget about moving from one step to another, can I even start solving the problem if my assumptions are all wrong? Not only they might be totally wrong, but more commonly they are not even explicitly stated. In statistics, for example, when you solve a problem, you often have to start with a hypothesis.

And what do you do? You openly state your hypothesis, and forget about statistics. When in Class 6 we were dealing with basic ideas of congruency etc. and there were problems, how did we start? Let there be a triangle ABC and then there is a similar triangle XYZ and this was stated right at the beginning of the solution. Is that not true? You are making your assumption obvious. Now the person who is coming to you, first of all, is he assuming something? Assumptions are dangerous.

Secondly, even if he’s assuming something, is he accepting that he is operating on assumptions? That does not often happen. And we lack both attention and time. So for example, a YouTube video comes to you and you start watching it and within 5 to 7 minutes, something just runs over you.

We have not been trained in critical thinking when it comes to matters of life. We know how to think critically but all that skill, all that training, we have somehow reserved only for problems dealing with science and technology, etc., not for problems that deal with life itself.

I find it very interesting and also saddening obviously, there are a lot of people who do very well in science and technology, etc., in their personal spheres are often deeply superstitious. How are these two things possible? These are possible because the same education that told us to think sharply so as to clear the JEE for example, told us to keep all the thinking process aside when it comes to life issues like motivation, like purposefulness, like friendship, like time management, like values, like money, like love. When it comes to all these, we behave in the same primitive ways as any uneducated person would. Believe me, as the trend is, if you are mostly B. Tech students here. How many B.Tech students here? Lots. A majority of us do not directly serve the field of our education. What then is the point in passing through all these years of rigorous training? There is a point. The point is that the mind should become accustomed to looking at anything in life with inquiry.

Even if you do not work as a mechanical engineer after having a degree or even a PG in mechanical engineering, still if you can retain the faculty of critical thought, your education has not been wasted on you. But we do not retain that. In the classroom, we are very inquisitive. In life, we are simply submissive and subordinate, we just accept anything.

There is a circuit diagram and there is a certain flow of current and you will want to know: Why there are certain fluctuations? Where is the impedance coming from? What is going on? And there is resistance and impedance within the mind that we take as just natural and normal and we do not go into it. Why?

And you will find it very interesting that the knowers who came up with the verses in Vedanta were actually taking a process that is very similar to the kind of process you take when you want to solve a scientific problem. Is that not highly liberating? You are so near yet so far. The sages were scientists in one sense, scientists who proceeded through the honest and rigorous method of experimentation, observation, and independent verification. That’s exactly what you also do in your labs and workshops, don’t you?

You solve a problem and you start claiming, I have solved it. Will that work? No. It has to be independently verified. If there is no one else to verify it then you should be the verifier at some other point in time. Because the problem is internal and it might appear solved in one mood in one frame of mind, so return to the solution two days later and question yourself: Is it solved? Does it still stand solved as it appeared two days back? We don’t do that. And that’s the reason why very, very ordinary and mediocre people succeed in fooling us.

I appreciate the question. People with very little worth and very little understanding of life are able to preach even to distinguished audiences like the one here. How does that become possible? The fellow might be working as a scientist in ISRO or DRDO, or probably even in NASA. And he regularly bows down to some primitive peddler of local kind of superstition. Amazing! Now this is magic. How does it even become possible?

The fellow leads a state-of-the-art research lab in Europe, Zurich but cannot begin his day without looking at one particular direction in the sky, eating one particular kind of dairy product. And some brainwashed kind of fellow visits his home and he will organize a great function to welcome and felicitate him. Why have you compartmentalized the mind in two halves? Why do you say that mathematics has to be applied only to numbers? Mathematics is not necessarily numerical. You get what I’m trying to say.

Why can’t the same spirit of inquiry be present in everything in life? When that same inquiry… I will not accept without verification. I will not take anything just because it seems to be coming from a particular authority or high seat or respectable position, I will not take it. The first freedom is to be free to question, to question others, and to question yourself. I feel like doing this, but why? Why should I be a dictator unto myself?

So if you have a book written by those influencers, pause at every sentence. Though most of them don’t write books. We don’t have anything worth writing. Pause at every sentence, analyze, and just refuse to move to the next sentence till you are contented with the current one and the previous ones. And if they are saying something in video or audio form, we said, the pause button is always there.

Don’t let them, as they say in English, pull a fast one. Do you understand what it means to pull a fast one? Haath ki safai (hand tricks). The magician on the stage does it just so cleanly and so swiftly that the audience is unable to catch the trick. Don’t let them get away with this. Don’t let him pull a fast one, I repeat.

And then people sometimes ask me and they seem a bit irritated. They say, “Sir why do you give so many gaps when you are speaking? Sometimes you seem to pause even for a minute, 60 entire seconds. Why do you do that?” And I ask him, what is your problem if I give you thinking space if I give you breathing space? Do you know what the problem is? We are accustomed to being steamrolled. Just come and run me over. Don’t give me time and opportunity to think because I’ve lost the capacity to think. And if you’ll give me the opportunity to think, I will feel irritated. I can imagine, I can waste myself in worries, fancies, and dreams I like, but critical thinking I abhor.

Why must that be the case, please? And remember, the world throws so many things at you continuously. If you do not have the filter of thought and inquiry, you will be enslaved and exploited. You live in a world full of ignorant beings, and when you are ignorant, you are violent and exploitative. That’s a rule. When you are ignorant, you do not know yourself.

When you do not know yourself, how do you take care of your anxiety and lack of fulfillment? You try to do that by exploiting another human being or animal or whatsoever is there in the world. You have too many desperate people around you and they do not know what they’re desperate for. But they feel the unease, they feel the internal pain and anger, so they will do anything to somehow get rid of their suffering. And how do they want to get rid of their suffering? By exploiting others.

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