When knowledge becomes abundant through printing, its perceived value transforms—revealing how scarcity once created artificial authority.
The printing press created a paradox: making knowledge abundant seemed to diminish its value, yet actually liberated it from artificial scarcity-based authority. Laozi understood paradox as the deepest truth—that opposites contain each other. Before printing, knowledge's rarity made priests and scholars gatekeepers of power. Abundance exposed this: knowledge itself has worth independent of its scarcity. This paradox continues today in digital spaces where free information coexists with expertise markets. The Taoist view suggests that true value emerges when we stop defending artificial scarcity and instead let knowledge circulate freely. Printing's disruption wasn't about devaluing expertise—it was about revealing that expertise's real power comes from its utility and wisdom, not from restricted access. Platforms embracing this paradox succeed by treating knowledge as naturally abundant yet individually valuable.
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