Know thyself

The warning in the title is an old Greek adage (gnōthi seauton) going back probably as far as 500 BCE. It has been attributed to a number of possible authors, including Plato, Pythagoras and Thales of Miletus. Part of its beauty resides in the fact that, even if it obviously revolves around the idea of self-reflection, it possesses a very wide meaning: some writers pointed to the need to know your own place in your context, your social environment and the relationships that tie it together, so as to avoid harm or disadvantage by knowing who can hurt you; others refer primarily to understanding your own capabilities so as to avoid finding yourself in a situation that you are able to handle; and yet another group advises to understand one's feelings and passions, so that the reactions can be kept under control and managed adequately. At any rate, I would unity the meanings of the maxim as "know where you truly stand so that you have a chance to understand what is coming and respond properly".

Photo: Lessing Photo Archive

I bring this up because over the last few days Karen and I have been watching </SCORPION> on Netflix, which falls in the category of "super smart and socially awkward bunch of people help the law enforcement agencies fight crime". I have not seen it mentioned anywhere, but it is fairly evident that the series follows in the footsteps of the earlier series NUMB3RS, also from CBS, that ran between 2004 and 2010. However, in contrast with the old series, Scorpion does not revolve around a single character, but around the whole group of talented people, each one with a well defined role: one is a computer hacker, one is a psychologist (although he is able to "read" people almost like a mentalist), a third one is a mechanical genius and the fourth one provides the math support. There is even a fifth character in the team, a former waitress, which is not talented in the same way the others are, but brings in the common sense and evens out the awkwardness of the rest of the team. In summary, they all "know themselves" pretty well: because their fields of expertise ar so clearly delineated, they rarely run into conflicts of responsibility.

Although the characters follow fairly strong narrative archetypes, it is nice to see that they are not uniquely defined by a single feature: they also have weaknesses (germophobia, ludopathy, etc.), and they are aware of them and try to work around their limitations. Of course, an essential part of the drama comes from the fact that they do not know their weaknesses and limitations perfectly, so they end up falling short of the expectations of their FBI liaison, and only thanks to a lot of extra work and a non-negligible contribution of luck, they mostly manage to pull the case off.

I find the concept quite entertaining, but also a good reminder that, even if you are confident that you can accomplish a task, one can have miscalculated, or something in the environment can change and make the task much harder or even impossible. I, too, am aware that I sometimes overestimate my strength (this was the main reason to start this blog, to keep track of my own failures of judgement), so I try to take my own assessments with a pinch of salt. I hope you do too. Have a nice evening.