"Difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones" - John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was a British economist whose ideas transformed the way governments manage their economies. He argued that during economic recessions, when people spend less and businesses struggle, governments should actively intervene by increasing public spending and creating jobs to stimulate economic activity. Unlike classical economists, who believed markets would naturally correct themselves; Keynes believed that government intervention could help restore economic stability. His ideas became the foundation of Keynesian economics and influenced economic policies around the world, particularly after the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The above quote comes from the preface of his famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). The original quote goes like, "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds." Although it is written in the context of explaining economic theories, the principles apply to everything. It is true we can always learn a new idea. But how can we get rid of the old one? And why is it so hard? In other words, is it true that our greatest intellectual limitation is not in the lack of new information but our attachment to familiar ways of thinking?
That really sounds complicated. Let's break it down simply. Imagine you are looking at a lake, and you are a scientist. While in the lab, you learn about the arrangement of the water molecules, how two hydrogen atoms are in harmony with oxygen. And how these atoms get together to form the live interaction of water. But when you are in front of the lake, you would not see atoms or molecules. You will only see a lake. You can say it is because your eyes cannot see the atoms and molecules. However, mind you, what we see is not just our eyes; it is a creation of our minds. Hence, I say, it is only because we have our previous convention or the belief that a lake exists, that we can see a lake. But truly speaking, there is just a collection of random atoms, moving against each other, occasionally splashing you.
In life, we learn things by pattern recognition. This is very easy to understand when we look at large language models of modern AI. It is just an algorithm built for pattern recognition. We learn a language by building a mental model of an alphabet. The problem and danger here is everything built on top of this basic structure called language is dependent on the properties of language itself. It is bounded by finite quantities. However, nature doesn't follow rules of discrete entities like in an alphabet. It is infinite. Infinitely many atoms, infinitely many instances. And it is very dynamic. So much so, something that happened in the past will never recur with the same exact pattern. So, what we recognize as patterns is just an illusion of one instance of such a complex process. Labeling this as a pattern would definitely help us to work in the future; however, there is the problem it may not give the same outcome as we expected in the past. The person who knows this would live a dynamic life, with a mind for continuous awareness and change.
It is an important exercise to think about this while we are at leisure. How many dead and old beliefs do we carry and inherit to our children, just because we did not investigate them thoroughly? How lazy we are as a society, as a generation, and as parents. How can we create a mind open to new ideas? Or simply, what are the ways of emptying the cup early morning, without drinking the same coffee mixed with leftovers from yesterday? Would meditation and mindfulness help?
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