Question Everything

In the 400's BC (a LONG time ago), Euripides coined the phrase, in one of his plays for the ancient Athenians,  "question everything."  It was one of those pithy sayings that rings with depth and has lasted for centuries even though we can't know how deeply Euripides may have felt its significance at the time he coined it.

Question everything: what's so profound about that?  In a word, to avoid being "sheeple" - a word formed by combining sheep and people.  Maybe from laziness, or inherent "energy conservation" tendencies, we tend to accept what others say about things without really thinking about how we truly feel about those things.  We trust even when we should be diligent.

It should not be offensive to others if we accept and appreciate what they pass on to us as information yet really process it including getting additional information before making what they say a part of our character and outlook.  Admiral Rickover (of US Navy nuclear power fame) often said, "trust but verify" it should actually honor a person more when we give our time and attention to what they tell us rather than just blindly store it.

My personal belief is that our understanding of things is at least as important as our knowledge about things.  I like to think in terms of a network made up of connectors (understanding, relationships between things, &c.) and nodes (knowledge, facts, &c.)  We tend to build up storerooms full of factual (node type) information randomly tossed in and with equal assigned credibility values when what we really need is a "web of understanding" made up of both knowledge and understanding.  Dealing with new situations and circumstances is dependent on our web of understanding.

Connectors are often expressed through densely packaged pithy and meaningful statements or adages.  We tend to recognize them as ringing much deeper than their simply analogies and words imply.  These deeper ringing adages perhaps capture "trunk" connectors: those that have wide and significant meaning common to many connectors and/or their place in the web of understanding.

The thing is that a web of understanding is under construction in all of us.  For those on the sheeple end of the spectrum, that construction is more automatic and random.  But for all of us it should be deliberate and managed.  Unless we test each item of knowledge and understanding for truthfulness and fit with other things we have already tested, we will build an unreliable and biased understanding of our world.

So, question everything, store knowledge well, and understand.  Hopefully some of these apothegmotionals (apothegm + devotional) will help.