Book Excerpts

I was five, or perhaps six when I asked my father why churches almost always have steeples. He told me, ‘Steeples point towards heaven. And church-going people like that idea.’ When I continued, ‘Why don’t modern churches always have steeples?’ he said, ‘Because people no longer know exactly where heaven is.’

My father always had an answer for everything. That was useful when I was young. Later, it became more difficult. He suffered from insomnia, as I do now, and spent nights reading our schoolbooks so that in the mornings he could show off that he knew everything better than we did. He always hoped that like him I would become a doctor, preferably a psychiatrist. But his competitive ways made that prospect less attractive. I secretly dropped chemistry at school, to ensure I could never become a doctor. By the time he found out, it was too late. It had been two years since my last chemistry lesson.

He continued trying to outsmart me throughout my student years. But all that stopped rather abruptly after I casually left Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) lying next to his armchair one evening. If there were a prize for the most difficult book in Western literature, I think Sein und Zeit would stand a good chance of winning. I had also indiscriminately underlined things, just to confuse him further.

So I didn’t become a doctor, which meant my career could not profit from his knowledge and experience. Since then, I’ve had many career switches. I changed from studying Chinese to political sciences and then to philosophy, where in the logic department I found what I was looking for. After that, I went from strategy advisor to entrepreneur and onto the board of an Internet firm, before becoming a lobbyist. Later, I returned to advisory, entrepreneurial, and board member roles. I’ve been involved in the worlds of the Internet, energy transition, education, and sustainability. I’ve even owned a dating agency and I’m still a shareholder in a beach bar.

As a Jack-of-all-trades, I’ve collected information and ideas over the years, sometimes useful – not always. Certainly, I now understand things I wish I had known at twenty. And I want to pass something of that on to my children. Since a large (possibly too large) part of my life has been spent in cerebral pursuits, what I leave behind should revolve around ideas. Global knowledge is so vast that it’s almost impossible to find a starting point. But for me, it all begins with my sons, Jan and Ebel. I started writing about subjects that might interest them.

Drawing on what has guided my own experiences, I have tried to find a number of principles, laws, or paradoxes that well or lesser-known scientists have written about. In the end, that number was 81. It’s a magic number for Hindus, 9 squared, and 9 always reverts to itself (any multiple of 9, when the digits are added together always makes 9). Not that this makes it more logical than any other number.

I have tried to tap into my children’s world, sometimes referring to places we’ve visited together or shared experiences. And that gives me quite a broad repertoire to choose from because we travel a lot together. In 2021 and 2022, we traveled through Europe: homeschooling from the backseat of our car, and a whole lot more knowledge learned in the wild. According to Johan Cruijff, every downside has its upside. The upside of the COVID-19 epidemic was that all the major attractions in Europe were unusually quiet. So the range of subjects in this book is extensive, like that trip.

The oldest idea dates from around 600 BC, the newest from last year. The book spans logic, mathematics, philosophy, economics, statistics, psychology, and biology. It features thinkers from Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. The most important criterion for including a particular scientific insight or not is whether I have come across it in my life and whether it changed my views. I’m not always faithful to the intentions and purposes of the thinkers I mention. Instead, I try to impart what I took away from them. And as succinctly as possible. That doesn’t always do their ideas justice, but I don’t have a lot of patience. My sons may have inherited that from me…

I’m not religious, I don’t adhere to any ideology, nor do I have a grand theory. Often, there’s a limit to an idea’s usefulness. It might work for you in some contexts while it’s no good in others. So every section can be read as a stand-alone. But to me, there are three overarching strands of thought.

The first: everything in the world is connected. If you want to understand something, you can either look at how it’s structured (the parts) or ask yourself what role it plays in a system (the whole). I like to emphasize the second approach, looking at the system, because it often provides fresh perspectives. That’s because our culture and education tend to focus on the component parts – you could call this reductionism. The latter approach has produced many good things, so we certainly don’t want to lose it, but it is an incomplete perspective. One that daily life is saturated with.

The second: our understanding is always limited. Whether by our blinkered, individual perspectives or because our comprehension is more simplistic than reality. In other words, there are an awful lot of things we don’t know, and what we think we know is often wrong.

The third: if you look at the world through the lens of systems, you must consider that we are also a part of those same systems. And that it’s impossible to be a part of something without influencing it. In these cases, the distinction between the observer and the systems we are observing blurs. By studying any system we are part of, we are studying ourselves.

These three strands braid together into one overarching thesis: we must change our perspective now and then. I don’t mean our worldview or values, but instead how we deal with certain situations. Wittgenstein once wrote: ‘A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.’ If you get stuck, you often have to try another approach. And sometimes that might require a different paradigm or idea.

My intention is not to teach my children something, since I know from experience just how much resistance that can generate. Also because it’s pointless – they’re never going to do anything they don’t want to. In the introduction to his book Tractatus, from 1922, Wittgenstein says: ‘This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar thoughts.’ My scribblings are a little out of that league, but it’s often the case in life: texts or other people may be able to help you, but what you truly learn often comes from within.

Another of Cruijff’s sayings: ‘You only see it once you get it.’