Are ancient people smarter than today’s people? This is really a fallacy, or a misunderstanding. It is impossible to say that modern people are in the era of high technology, and the human brain has degenerated.
Scientific research results also show that human brain capacity has not changed significantly for tens of thousands of years. Airplanes, cars, high-speed trains, etc., which were only imagined in the past, are real existence in modern times, and they have also popularized what the ancients thought was an unparalleled existence - smartphones that you can use every day.
In some ways, ancient counselors are the embodiment of wisdom and objects of worship. Even though their strategies are no longer useful in this modern era of advanced technology, it does not affect the fact that they are a crystallization of wisdom.
The books that ancient counselors read, whether it was the Classics and History Collection or Qi Men Dun Jia, the knowledge gained in the books should not have enough scientific and technological content. It is far less than the knowledge points mastered by a modern junior high school student, even if it is about strategy and tactics. Zhuge Kongming, whose decision-making was admirable, was far behind them.
1. Reading in ancient times was not easy. In the early days, bamboo slips were used to record knowledge. This is where the modern term "too many to write down" comes from. Therefore, the knowledge they acquired was limited. Even if it was later recorded on paper, the price of paper was not cheap, so only a very small number of them could own many books.
2. Modern society has nine-year compulsory education, and there is almost no threshold for high school and university. Unlike ancient times, where reading was the exclusive preserve of high-income families, the threshold for intellectuals was very high.
3. Modern times are an information age, and a lot of knowledge can be easily obtained on mobile phones and computers.
From these three points, we can see that the books read by the ancients are indeed not as extensive, profound, classified and organized as those of modern people. The number of literati counselors is small, so why are the ancient counselors so How about smart?
Even in a modern society with such advanced technology, many works of the ancients are still worth learning from, such as "Thirty-Six Strategies", "Sun Tzu's Art of War" and other famous works.
It is true that the ancient counselor did not read much, but through the "Analects of Confucius": "Learning without thinking will lead to ignorance; thinking without learning will lead to peril". You can find out why he was so smart. This sentence can be understood as a reading method proposed by Confucius, which means that you must be better at thinking while reading. If you just read without thinking, you will never improve.
But if you only think and don’t read, you have no basis for thinking and innovation.
The schedule of ancient people was extremely regular. They went to bed when it got dark at night and got up at dawn in the morning. There were basically no entertainment activities. Unlike modern times, half of a person’s 24 hours a day is spent on While eating, drinking and having fun, the other half is spent sleeping, working and thinking.
Calculated this way, modern people have less than one hour of thinking time a day. It can be said that the ancients had more free time to look up at the stars and look down at the earth, so they had enough time to think. If we look at the ancient counselors in modern times, they should be famous figures in the philosophical world!
How many modern people can truly learn in a down-to-earth manner? In terms of population ratio, most of them just get some fragmented entertainment "knowledge" from their mobile phones, and don't have time to think about it at all!
No matter what kind of science, it is not achieved overnight, and many modern civilizations are built on the shoulders of generations of ancients.