What follows is a portion of an essay my son, Grant Bright, wrote for a scholarship application. I thought I would share it here.

“This place. This is the fruit of unquestioned, ferocious conviction. This is where absolute certainty leads.” 

Most people who read this essay probably won’t recognize that quote. Those few who do are probably wondering how a quote from Wolfenstein: The New Order, an M-rated video game, could possibly be relevant to an essay about the importance of lifelong learning. Allow me to explain how.

To understand that quote and how it’s relevant, we’ll need a little context. Those three sentences are spoken by Set Roth, a jewish character from The New Order. And “the place” he’s referring to is Camp Belica, a nazi-run death camp. It is, in essence, a place run by people so certain in their worldview and ideology they are willing to engage in industrialized mass-murder in that ideology’s name, so certain that they have nothing more to learn that they slaughter millions of people who they believe have nothing to contribute to their New Order. 

And as you are likely all too aware, the Nazis didn’t just do that in the context of Wolfenstein: The New Order. Despite what some holocaust deniers would have you believe, places like Camp Belica did exist in the real world, places such as Auschwitz and Dachau and Nohra. I should know; I’ve studied the Nazis very thoroughly, reading things like Maus and Night, all in my quest to understand what drove the Nazis to let their fanaticism override their basic human decency, what drives other cultures to keep making the same mistake, even after the end of World War II. And I’ve found that the reasons why a group decides that another needs to be wiped out almost always boils down to the same absolute certainty Set Roth spoke of.

That, right there, is why lifelong learning is important. Absolute certainty that there is nothing more to learn is what brought about the holocaust, so naturally the best way to prevent it is to embrace uncertainty, embrace the fact that there will always be more to learn. And we do that by understanding other viewpoints, acknowledging and listening to criticism, and being willing to change our beliefs when they’re proven wrong or misleading. Instead of just blindly accepting statements because it’s what we want to hear, we ask ourselves hard questions about those beliefs and whether they line up with our values and knowledge, backing them up not with raw emotion but evidence, research, and data, and changing them to reflect new information we receive. 

That’s why I’m seeking a college education as an Economist. While many of them, like Claudia Goldin, have been doing groundbreaking research on the flaws in our society and how we can leverage economics to fix them, others are falling into the same trap that the Nazis fell into, clinging to economic policies that benefit the rich and powerful at the cost of those below them because they don’t want to admit that they’re wrong. We need more Economists like Goldin, like me; people who go in with a willingness to analyze and deconstruct past assumptions, people who are willing to acknowledge that they don’t know everything, people who truly understand that the quest to learn is life-long, and doesn’t end when you graduate from school.