I think regardless of the details the statement in its strongest form is true of virtually everyone. Maybe anyone, if they just applied themselves, could work hard their whole life and achieve mastery of one topic. Let’s concede that.
That still leaves all of the other topics that are equally relevant to their lives and have no hope to have enough time to also understand before they die. I understand a lot about science and computers, and I’m even decently polymath-y enough to get a bit of stuff like biology, medicine, law. But I’m still dependent on the “priesthoods” of those fields; a mediocre lawyer knows far more law than I do. And it’s simply not economical nor, ultimately, possible for me to achieve a comparable level of understanding at everything I’d need to to be able to look at the world and say “ah, yes, I get it now, I see how the cogs tick”.
I think regardless of the details the statement in its strongest form is true of virtually everyone. Maybe anyone, if they just applied themselves, could work hard their whole life and achieve mastery of one topic. Let’s concede that.
That still leaves all of the other topics that are equally relevant to their lives and have no hope to have enough time to also understand before they die. I understand a lot about science and computers, and I’m even decently polymath-y enough to get a bit of stuff like biology, medicine, law. But I’m still dependent on the “priesthoods” of those fields; a mediocre lawyer knows far more law than I do. And it’s simply not economical nor, ultimately, possible for me to achieve a comparable level of understanding at everything I’d need to to be able to look at the world and say “ah, yes, I get it now, I see how the cogs tick”.