Not Up to It?

Do you think you may be “not up to it”? Do you think it’s too demanding, too complicated, too specialistic, too restricted−to−the−initiated, too this or that for you? If you do, you’ve taken it the wrong way around.
One of the possible stops in getting it to you exact, complete and clear is your point of view. If you have been belittled.
If you know the anecdote of the detainee who can’t conceive leaving his cell when released after a long sentence, you can guess what I mean by “belittled”: the universe unfolds infinite around him, but his point of view has been reduced to the size of a cell.

First, you personally have the right to know and the right to understand. You’re nobody’s fool. Anyone above you is accountable to you personally for that very position, and not the reverse. And you’re a peer to your fellows, equally accountable to one another.

Second, you are not a natural born specialist at all. It has been said that a specialist is “one who knows more and more about less and less”. The idea that individuals are “specialists” is spread with the purpose of convincing them there are things they cannot understand and have no right to speak about. The truth is you can understand anything… if the information is supplied and understandable. And when someone handles specialized matters, they can, and they must, account in such a way that any non−specialist can understand and have his or her say.

Third, you are subject to a continual and rather invisible pressure to make you look at it the other way round, to look at things from the viewpoint of a subject instead than from that of a free sovereign individual. But as I said, you’re nobody’s fool.

When you grope in the dark, it’s not that you don’t have the right to know or you don’t understand; it’s that someone is hiding something. And you are the person concerned, you are the target: so the ultimate responsibility to enforce accountability, and to know, in spite of everything, is yours.