“Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.”
Arthur Schopenhauer - On Thinking for Oneself
Mid-wittery is an ailment which is difficult to cure. In the past, frustrated by many aspects of life I turned to books for answers. Online there are a lot of people only too happy to recommend a book. And I naively thought that the books recommended most were the best books. So, I read those first. After all was learning not the cure for my stupidity. I became trapped in a cycle of reading one book after another so I could feel like I had made progress. I read through as fast as I could and then moved on, like the man who eats every dish at the buffet in the hope that he satiates his appetite.
With time I realised two things that in hindsight I should have realised much quicker. One, reading is easy. That’s why the midwit enjoys it so much. The physical books on their shelf are like trophies. They convey status and signify a kind of intellectual elitism. If you question the value of all this reading the midwit will become flustered. They reply, “I must be clever I read 52 books last year.” If you are unsure whether you are a midwit try explaining a concept out loud. If it comes out jumbled with a lot of hesitation, then you have some work to do.
Some take this a step further. They are even more serious. They read with a pen in hand and take notes and highlight relevant passages. But still this reading does them little good. They file their notes to review them later. On the metaphorical rainy day that never comes.
I can read Schopenhauer's "Thinking for Oneself" and know he is right. But the cognitive dissonance is too strong. I can’t stop reading. It feels too good. So, in part this piece is to convince myself of the truth. There is only one way to learn and that is to think. On your own. And there is nothing that forces you to think more than writing. Both are frustrating. For a long time, it seems like you are doing nothing, and any output produced will be unimpressive. But anything worthwhile is hard. Any idea of your own regardless of how long it took is far more valuable than one you have picked up second hand.
“At bottom, only our own fundamental ideas have truth and life; for it is they alone which we really and thoroughly understand.”
For thinking is how we connect disparate ideas. In Koestler’s “Act of Creation”, he describes the creative act as the fusion of two bifurcating ideas. Simple enough. Novelty is putting ideas that look incompatible together in a way that makes sense. Writing a simple summary of a book always was a waste of time. But in the age of AI, it has become even more so. If all you can do is parrot ideas without adding anything new technology will fast make your efforts obsolete.
The scholar who spends his days reading the ideas of others becomes confused. There are many voices forever cycling round in his head and muddling his thoughts. He is only able to make assertive claims when he has the right quote to back him up. He can’t trust his own intuition. Even when he writes the reader can sense this lack of conviction. It will feel out of joint and will always be dull to read.
“Such a system is then like an automaton composed of foreign material, whereas that of the original thinker resembles a living human being.”
You can’t transcend midwittery straight away. Write down your own fleeting ideas. Capture as many as possible. Of all the ideas we perceive to be valuable only a select few of those will interest the reader. Yet with time your ideas and writing will improve. So good luck and throw away your copy of Sapiens because the world needs fewer midwits.