Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing

Our age is the age of information and quickly developing technologies, for modern people knowledge is a necessity to survive in this world. Every day people acquire more and more new knowledge. But even in the Bible God warns men that knowledge brings more regret than it does value: “He that increases knowledge increases sorrow”.

Actually there is a rational kernel in this statement: the more we know, the more we suffer from our knowledge. Let’s take for example nutrition — when people don’t examine special literature, read articles and forums on the Internet and receive additional knowledge on this topic from other sources, they simply know that vegetables are healthy, while fast food is dangerous for our health. People take this knowledge into consideration when they cook dishes, but they are not fanatic about it. However, when people have too much knowledge about healthy nutrition they start to pay attention to every small detail: that some products cannot be eaten together with other products, that this product is better preserved in a dark place instead of a well-lit room, etc.

Today people really suffer from an oversupply of knowledge. They don’t know which information they can trust and which information they should deny. It is a real problem of modern society. Probably in several decades children will have a special subject at school where they will be taught how to find and select useful information, because the capabilities of our mind are not boundless — people cannot know and remember everything.

We often hear from parents and teachers that knowledge is power and it’s really true, but we should always know when enough is enough. It is extremely important for every person to have deep knowledge in the sphere he works in, in the sphere of his interests and spheres he often deals with, but it is not necessary to know everything, because sometimes too much knowledge can be a really dangerous thing.