fear and innovation
2020-01-26
Let me state something fairly obvious: fear is a trait that badly gets in the way of innovation. A fearful person is terrified of making mistakes, and that smothers innovation, which takes enormous energy and courage. And here a curious dilemma appears: the person who avoids mistakes out of fear of making them is making a mistake.
As Albert Einstein said:
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
For innovation to appear, people need an environment where they can make mistakes freely, without fear. Fear only teaches people to leave the old ways alone, to be grateful for what they have, to put up with it. And what's true of people is true of the state and society too: the environment in the family and the mahalla (the neighborhood), in schools and universities, in government agencies and governance, in business.
If fear is the foundation of how children are raised, for example, they simply do what they're told, and anything new becomes a threat. It's pointless to expect innovation from someone who looks at novelty with suspicion.
Now, about the state. In my view, many fields in Uzbekistan are still run by fearful people. They don't want anything to change; to them, new means dangerous; their thinking hasn't moved past the primitive. Various experiments tried around the world might, in their eyes, lead to some frightening outcome.
Examples:
- Dragging the propiska question out for a decade. The residence permit, a Soviet-era system built on fear and on controlling people, has lived on in independent Uzbekistan for nearly 30 years. True, a system like that is hard to change overnight, but by putting it off we're losing years anyway. What exactly the state agencies fear here has never been properly justified. It's one of the things that directly infringes on people's freedom.
- Fencing government buildings off. The heads of these agencies seem to have arrived from a million years B.C. Look around: the population living in this country is people, not dinosaurs or wild beasts.
- Fencing off train stations and airports and letting people in only with a ticket and a passport. With that in place, we can forget about simply boarding a train or a plane with a QR code straight from a phone.
- The moment drones appeared, Uzbekistan restricted bringing them into the country. With that, the state flat-out closed the door on anyone importing one, examining it, modifying it, running all kinds of experiments. Kids who might grow into scientists had their right to experiment taken away, again on some foolish fear-driven reasoning. Dig a little deeper and you find that drone makers keep their no-fly zones constantly updated, and a state can ask them to add a region. Or it could let individuals register drones online (right now you have to be a legal entity). If flying cars come out a bit later and get the same ban, I won't be surprised.
- Universities tracking attendance like maniacs, afraid students might get into something out of the ordinary, and keeping them busy with pointless, useless subjects. Students should be thinking more freely, working on all kinds of projects, changing the world.
There are plenty more examples like these; I wrote about the ones I run into most. The current changes are much better, but not enough. And not every change has to go through the president. Let everyone else do their job too, instead of just applauding or tending to cotton farming.
The state shouldn't treat its people like small children: "I must protect them from dangers, real or imagined," "this needs restricting," "they can't handle this or that." The state should be doing everything it can, and then some, to help its people succeed. In most cases it's enough to give people opportunity and freedom, and clear away the obstacles standing in their way.