The Hammer

Today, while reading Poor Charlie's Almanack, I came across this passage: "Because of the various forces at work during World War II, I briefly studied basic physics. That study greatly improved my wisdom. As a result I gained more mental models, so I'd be even less likely to become the 'man with a hammer' of the saying."

Nothing in this passage struck me as especially brilliant, but I was strangely curious about "the man with a hammer" at the end, so afterward I looked it up.

The phrase comes from a Western proverb: "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

In psychology it's also called "Maslow's hammer." Abraham Maslow said: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

How do I understand this? A person holding a hammer sees nails everywhere. So does a person holding a sickle see leeks everywhere (in Chinese slang, easy marks ready to be harvested)? What I seem to see in this saying is a critique of fixed thinking. No, maybe not only fixed thinking.

When a person has mastered a tool, skill, or way of thinking, they tend to overuse it and treat every problem as one that tool can solve.

From this angle, I started to wonder: is there a god in this world who knows everything and can do everything? Obviously not. If there were, Investiture of the Gods wouldn't have needed all that effort to set up the investiture list and recruit people to the divine realm. Even gods each have their own duties, so how could a hammer be any different?

Let me give an example. Materialist dialectics and critical thinking, which I treat as scripture, aren't a cure-all either. It's true they can be used to structure almost anything in the world. But that's exactly where the problem lies. Once a problem is structured, is it solved?

People are complex social animals, not binary. Many things can't be explained or solved by pure reason alone. So when I saw Maslow's hammer, I immediately thought of myself.

I thought of the years when I was most wild about Marxism and materialist dialectics. Back then I read the original works like mad every day. You could say materialist dialectics remade me completely. But that remaking brought a lot of benefits, and also a lot of bitterness that's hard to put into words.

Maslow's hammer can stand for almost anything beyond a literal hammer. Take someone used to critical thinking: they may end up criticizing everything without realizing it. And someone good at materialist dialectics gets used to squeezing every trivial little matter into a grand narrative frame.

A few years ago I already realized the problem. I saw that this wasn't right, like practicing martial arts until you lose your mind. I felt a bit unhinged. So I gradually distanced myself from books on Marxism and started broadening my horizons, so that no single school of thought would shape me completely.

I think this turned out to be the right decision.

Of course, that doesn't mean I've abandoned materialist dialectics or anything. I think this approach hasn't harmed my understanding. If anything, it's an expansion.

I don't use a hammer at work, but I do have a very varied toolbox. In it are three different kinds of pliers: wire strippers, diagonal cutters, and needle-nose pliers. They're all pliers, but each does something different. Can you strip wire with diagonal cutters? If you insist, yes. But being able to do the job and doing it well are two completely different things.

Life is the same. If you only use one way of thinking to handle life's problems, that's being stubborn.

Dialectics tells me that everything develops and changes, and everything has two sides.

If I took dialectics as an absolute truth with a fixed agenda and forced it onto my life, that would itself go against dialectics. It would become dogma.

So a real materialist should dare to face the diversity and complexity of this world, and be willing to step into real life, full of paradoxes.

That sounds simple. Doing it is not.

In some social settings, being a specialist makes a person. In others, being a specialist limits one.