Saturday, November 07, 2009

Reinventing the Wheel?

For years I have been listening to people warn me against “reinventing the wheel.” It makes sense and though I cringe every time I hear it (I have a natural aversion to laziness in language; and the anti-intellectualism it hints at), I never considered the burgeoning crisis it might invoke. Recently I have become troubled that this common cliché might in fact be causing immeasurable harm to humanity. What if a better wheel is out there, but has been left undiscovered because of the demoralizing message spread so far and wide. Is the wheel we have been using for thousands of year really so great? Is there a better design out there waiting to push us forward into an unimaginable future? Probably not, but I really hate that phrase.

On a related note is the pervasive “thinking outside the box.” I have long believed that anyone that uses this phrase is in fact stuck inside a box from which it would take them several years to emerge – given the constricted logic and language available to them. Thinking outside the proverbial box is indicative of the instrumental rationality that forever keeps us inside the prison house (or box) of language and business mentality that in fact makes the world fully enclosed with that box.

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