Book review: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

Picking up the book to read feels like standing on the edge of insight and understanding that will magically correct the errors. Like in the movie 'Inception' when Cobb tells Ariadne that she is dreaming which awareness causes her destroy the dream.

Unfortunately, Dobelli only goes to show just how unclearly the average human thinks. Another literary material for the reader to marvel at the folly of humanity, if one is inclined to think so.

The book was a bestseller for 80 consecutive weeks in Germany, a bestseller in South Korea, India, Ireland, Singapore and Iran and is enjoyed in a variety of languages.

Dobelli strives to highlight painful personal and social experiences, time and energy wastage through habitual thinking left unchecked.

"Indeed, my wish is quite simple: if we could learn to recognise and evade the biggest errors in thinking _in our private lives, at work or in government_ we might experience a leap in prosperity. We need no extra cunning, no new ideas, no unnecessary gadgets, no frantic hyperactivity_ all we need is less irrationality," he says.

Management and maintenance

Contrary to Dobelli, a community of progress studies, founded by an influential and wealthy economist, believes that advancement can only be quantified by scientific, technological and economic growths.

Their argument is that most of human history is a bleak picture of impoverished people struggling to keep whatever they had amidst war and pandemics. Then, about 200 years ago the world started to make progress in alleviating poverty, infant mortality, all thanks to science, technology and economic growth.

The community fears that this progress is coming to a standstill and it endeavours to look into what makes progress in order to keep it alive.

In the first chapter of his book, Dobelli advises the reader to study the cemetery of humanity, a metaphorical graveyard of people who did not make it in life. He says that society promotes the stars who are few while making an unconscious pact to ignore the vast failures like the darkness that makes the stars shine.

Perhaps what the Progress Studies community lacks is perspective from other intelligent existences to compare humanity's journey to. Never mind that most of what progress has its roots in the impoverished history, after all necessity is the mother of invention. What does progress need?