You can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions,” Albert Einstein is famously quoted as having said. The context and intent may be open to interpretation, but people often quote this to suggest that traditional value system will not work in this fast-changing technology-driven world. So change the way you were doing things or else your ways will not work.
Who can deny this when Einstein, arguably the best brain even produced, says thisIJ But wait a moment. This is not to question Einstein’s genius. Only we need to look at the contention. Are today’s problems essentially different than those of yesterday’sIJ There is need to think more objectively.
What were yesterday’s problemsIJ The first one was the humankind’s weakness to fall for temptations and allurements. According to the Bible, the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, were the first persons to go by devil’s advice. Incidentally, they broke the first law, the divine law. The first crime was committed for greed. Coming to the second one, again from the Bible, why did Cane kill AbelIJ Simple — envy, greed, and ego. Well such instances are legion in the Bible.
That was the Occident. Coming to the Orient. Why did the battle of Kurukshetra take placeIJ Same problem — envy, greed and ego. Still not convinced. Come to the modern times. Why was Indira Gandhi unseated by that historic Allahabad High Court judgementIJ And why did she impose the EmergencyIJ Why could VP Singh defeat the Congress that appeared invincible with 415 seats in the lok SabhaIJ Why did Jayaprakash Narayan become a rallying point in the early SeventiesIJ And very recently, why did the Congress fare miserably in 2014 Parliamentary pollsIJ
The problems were not much different. It was corruption, the deviation from dharma, the righteous path. Well Einstein was perfectly right. It is our interpretation of Einstein that is wrong. There are only two paths in this world — the right path or the path of dharma and the wrong path or the path of adharma. Those who have followed the righteous path have triumphed in the long run. If it was Noah of the Old Testament, then it were the Pandavas of Mahabharata.
The problems of the present times are the same as those of the past. Naturally, the solutions of the past are still relevant. Apparently, it seems that the world has changed. It may have changed as far as technology is concerned. But the greed, ego, lust behind the technology still remain the same because the human nature remains fairly constant. Man does not live in the Stone Age, but the Stone Age still lives in him.
Human psychology has been fairly constant over the ages. If the Facebook posts indicate the humanity’s desire for likes, that is recognition, how do you explain the story that we read in our Hindi textbook in the early Sixties about the boy Gurudas whose ambition was to see his name figure in the print media. The name of the story is quite suggestive, ‘Akhbaar mein Naam’ or the name in the newspaper.
The problems of today are similar to that of the yesteryears, so we still have to apply yesterday’s solution. Greed was a human weakness aeons ago. Greed is a human weakness even today. Everyone wants a quick buck — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Technology is changing but psychology is still found wanting.
The writer is a professor of management and public speaker. He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com
