Power Tools

“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

I can remember as a young boy watching my father do all kinds of projects in the garage. My dad was very accomplished in the construction industry and he had tremendous expertise with the tools of his trade but my father worked with metal in commercial construction so his tools were rarely applicable to his home projects. He would try valiantly to adapt his random and limited set of tools to tasks such as the assembly of a new set of kitchen chairs or the building of a shelf but it was always a struggle. The lack of tool options, expressly power tools, not only affected his ability to handle complex tasks, it also eliminated the imagining of possible solutions. There were many instances when the only options for building or repairing something were to either to tap or pound on objects with a hammer. I followed my father into the trades and over time I expanded into home remodeling projects. Over the years, this required me to amass quite a large number of power tools. I have far surpassed what my father was able to achieve in the garage not because of intelligence or fundamental skills but because I have power tools with very specific job applications. The fact is I rarely drive nails with a hammer; I have several nail guns to do that for me.

There is a strong connection between the building of a wall or a piece of furniture and the formulation of ideas and beliefs. The world we know today is a very complex place with extremely complicated problems and challenges. To try and understand the problems we face as a society and to make progress toward solving them we need a vast variety of tools. Unlike the physical tools needed to form, cut, or attach materials, we must seek-out the tools of knowledge and experience to form clear understanding. To truly be able to find real and lasting answers it is our job to explore history, investigate the present, delve into personal experiences, and go where those facts take us. Knowledge and experience are intellectual tools that are the basis for judgement, decision making and planning. It is the understanding of issues and problems that these tools provide that individually gives us the ability to form conclusions and collectively create solutions.

For centuries it was forbidden by the Catholic Church for anyone to translate the Bible from Latin to another language. The Church proclaimed it an abomination to read the word of God in a common language. Powers within the Catholicism insisted that the Bible remained in Latin so the it could only be analyzed and interpreted by a small fraction of the population. This gave the Catholic Church the power to singularly control the message of the Bible. By doing so they were able to twist and mold the words of the Bible into a powerful method of congregational control. They denied the common man the tools to read, interpret, and thus form independent and informed conclusions. They maintained power by insisting upon and enforcing ignorance. 

Like the Catholic Church centuries ago, in the world today there are very strong forces in every venue that try and tell us that we do not need to seek knowledge for ourselves. They transform our reticence or laziness to acquire our own power tools into their tools of power. They tell us that we only need to listen to those we affiliate ourselves with to know what to think and believe. They assure us that their world view is based on an accurate depiction of the truth. They subliminally try and relieve us of the burden of doing our own homework with the promise that they have done the work and that we just need to follow their lead. So we turn to those who agree with our base assessment of life and we let them validate our opinions. We become emboldened by a sense of belonging to a group of other myopic believers. This is how society is manipulated into factions of belief that are driven by self-serving forces.

A hammer is a tool that requires very little instruction. This makes the hammer the tool of choice for the inexperienced and the ill-equipped. Hammers are used to roughly pound and in some cases pull which renders them useless in any remotely complicated task. If we use the analogy of the hammer in terms of thought and expressed opinion, one can quickly see the short-comings. In the exploration of understanding, the more knowledge of a subject one has the greater ability to form an articulate opinion. Seeking other views and testing our opinions against those who disagree with our own assessments is in its essence the process of collecting more tools of understanding. When we fail to acquire our own set of tools and grant others the power to distill everything down to a nail so we can mindlessly pound on it, we have abdicated our responsibility to learn the truth, form opinions, and make decisions independently of the propaganda of the moment. Although it may appear to be so at first glance, answers are seldom as simple as pounding on a nail with a hammer.