Winning by knowing

To begin, it will be useful to examine contemporary appropriations of the idea that knowledge is power in more detail. What do these tell us about what this idea means today. The Volkswagen billboard offers an insight.

The image above the slogan is, unsurprisingly, of the Amarok itself. The truck is covered with a series of complex mathematical equations suggestive of the extensive technical understanding that is required in the design and construction of an automobile. Drawing our attention to this fact is Volkswagen’s way of highlighting how clever their trucks really are.The image serves as an indication of the knowledge that has gone into the design and manufacture of the Amarok: a knowledge that Volkswagen has and that you, as the consumer, can acquire. Ultimately, the aim of the advertisement is to make the truck appear desirable to the target market.According to the marketing teams at Volkswagen, it is the knowledge that has gone into the development of this new model that renders it desirable, leading to the image and choice of slogan. Power, it is assumed, is something that we want and knowledge is power. As long as we identify power with knowledge and knowledge with Volkswagen, then buying Volkswagen gets us something that we want. Hence Volkswagen can sell us pick-up trucks on the basis of this famous Enlightenment adage. It is difficult to imagine what Bacon would make of this bold endorsement by one of the twenty-first century’s largest automobile manufacturers. Given his ties to Empiricism, we might imagine him taking pride in the show of scientific and technological prowess implied by the advertise- ment.At any rate, we can conclude, at least as far as Volkswagen is concerned, that knowledge represents a certain kind of value. And it can be used to sell pick-up trucks. Knowledge has selling power, one might say.

The PlayStation game — ‘Knowledge is Power’ — offers another insight. In this quiz-show style game, players select a character and answer a series of questions to progress through the rounds in competition with fellow players.

A player wins by consistently selecting the correct answers to the questions faster than the other players in the game.Winning can, one imagines, be loosely construed as some form of power in the context of a PlayStation game. At least, this is one easy way to make sense of the company’s choice to adopt the claim that knowledge is power as the title of the game. Noticeably, in this case, knowledge is not so much selling power (although there is perhaps some sense in which that notion is operating in the background). Rather, knowledge is winning, and winning is power. In this sense, the PlayStation game offers a virtual representation of the real-world game that Volkswagen is playing in the marketing of its pick-up truck. In both cases, knowledge is positioned as having a certain kind of value. That value is attached to power, through the use of the Enlightenment claim. And power, it is assumed, is something that we want. Whether it be the power one briefly wields by beating one’s friends and family to the top of the leaderboard in a PlayStation game, or by driving away from the Volkswagen dealership in a shiny new pick-up truck. Either way, these seemingly unrelated and innocuous uses of the claim that knowledge is power shed light on the idea that underlies that claim in the twenty-first century. In the post-Enlightenment world in which we live, knowledge can and does position one in a power relation with others. Put simply, as in the PlayStation game, you win by knowing. I believe that this idea is pervasive in contemporary society, throughout public and private life.We find it in our scientific endeavours, our politics, our media discourse, and in our educational institutions.

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Source: Alfano Mark, Lynch Michael P.. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility. Routledge,2020. — 514 p.. 2020

Winning by knowing

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