When crunching wisdom is a career

Trending on Netflix is a show based on the bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Its author, Japanese organising consultant Marie Kondo, has devised the KonMari Method to declutter living spaces. She says by “mindfully” discarding objects which do not “spark joy” , you also do inner cleansing. You could chuck parts of a whole. So if only certain pages of a book bring you joy, she suggests ripping them out.

Its appeal, for a generation of consumerist clutterbugs, is understandable. Her ideas echo the Zen aesthetic principles of simplicity and minimalism. But essentially, they draw from nous; it’s common sense that clearing a mess would make one feel good.

Many careers have been made out of recycling pedestrian Eastern principles and selling them as magic formulae to reorder life. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, for instance, refashions Buddhist maxims in his book, 12 Rules For Life, to say “Tell the truth. Or at least don’t lie”, “Life is suffering”, and “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.”

Crunching scriptural and ideological wisdom is key to propping up a marketable narrative. Take author Alain de Botton, whose popular YouTube channel, School Of Life, condenses abstruse philosophies and makes them palatable for the masses.

But truncating complex theories could be a dangerous endeavour, for much gets lost in condensation. And people, known to have confirmation biases and ulterior motives, are susceptible to using and misusing grand ideas to back their own limiting beliefs. 

This is amply seen in the corporate world. Anything ranging from the Bhagavad Gita to Sun Tzu’s Art Of War is cited blatantly to add zing to boardroom advisories or legitimise capitalist motives.

Something akin to what politics has done with 15th-century political adviser Niccolo Machiavelli, distorting and distilling his coda, till he became a byword for political scheming. 

This skewing of ideas to the point where the original loses relevance by having been caricaturised is seen in the widely circulated Confucius meme templates, where the 4th-century Chinese philosopher appears as a Chuck Norris one-liner.

But if one keeps aside the risibly reductive ways in which wisdom gets passed on as cultural information, is there something to be said for such derivative literature? Is stripping back recherche knowledge and making it accessible to the public to be railed against? Shouldn’t knowledge, like language, have to evolve to serve the people, rather than being concepts that exist out there for their own sake?

Probably. People, after all, have the freedom to choose the cultural chronicles they want to consume. And for a new idea to get a foot in the door, the individual has to begin somewhere. So, once initiated in mindful decluttering, one may delve into zazen. Those intrigued by a Kierkegaard primer on YouTube may go on to pore over existentialist theory. Fledgling climbers on the corporate ladder can trace the source of the saws they hear at training workshops to deepen their knowledge. It works for everybody because,  at bottom, as the poet said, all knowledge is spendable currency.