Curiosity as a Cure

“The cure for ignorance is not information. It’s humility and curiosity.” — Adam Grant 

 

Last week, I visited the Topography of Terror in Berlin — a museum built on the ground where the Gestapo and SS once had their headquarters. The walls are gone. What remains is documentation — photographs, orders, timelines — laid out with a precision that refuses to let you look away. 

I took a guided tour. He started next to a photo of Hitler and his closest advisors shortly after the election in 1933. Then he told us about his parents. They voted for Hitler. Twice. Not because they wanted a holocaust. He promised jobs, a stable economy, and restoring national pride. 

He wasn’t telling us this to condemn them. He was holding up a mirror. 

What struck me most wasn’t the history itself. It was the machinery — the slow, methodical process that made the systematic murder of more than eleven million people possible. Six million Jews. Millions more — Slavs, Roma, disabled, gay, political dissidents — each collapsed into a label before they were erased. 

It didn’t start with concentration camps. It started with labels. With collapsing a whole human being into a single word. For seven years before the first deportation trains rolled, the propaganda machine did one thing relentlessly: it transformed Eli-the-neighbor into “That Jew Eli.” 

Once the label replaced the person, people didn’t have to hate Eli. They just had to stop seeing him as human. 

The guide called it a narrowing. I recognize it closer to home. 

We pick sides. We make a common enemy. And then something subtle happens — we don’t just push them down. We lift ourselves up. We exceptionalize what it means to be on our side. Smarter. More rational. More compassionate. More patriotic. More American. And once our group is exceptional, the other group’s pain starts to feel earned. Deserved. Maybe even a little satisfying. 

That’s the machinery running. Not in 1940. Right now. 

A dad who voted differently than you is still a dad. A neighbor who watches different news is still a neighbor. Someone trying to keep their family safe and give their kids a good life doesn’t stop being that person because of a bumper sticker or a hat. 

But the label makes it easy to forget. And once we forget, we stop caring. Not an expression of hate. Reduction of who they are, to something less human. 

People sometimes say — well, what about them?  When someone else’s behavior becomes the standard I hold myself to, the floor drops out from under everyone. We’re not lifting anything up. We’re just racing to the next level down. At some point, someone has to take a stand in ways that align to their values — not in reaction to someone else’s failures. I’m realizing that I cannot let what other people say or do orient my moral compass. 

Which brings me to Adam Grant’s post this week. He wrote: “The cure for ignorance is not information. It’s humility and curiosity. Facts can be easily dismissed. What motivates people to gain insight is recognizing gaps in their understanding and wanting to find out more.” 

The machinery of indifference operates on the opposite. It runs on certainty and contempt. When I’m certain about who someone is within a label, I stop being curious about who they are beyond it. When I’ve reduced a person to a single word, I’ve already decided there’s nothing left to learn. The file is closed. 

Grant is saying: more information won’t reopen it. More facts, more data, more evidence that the other side is wrong — none of that penetrates, because the issue was never ignorance. The issue is that we’ve stopped being curious about each other. We’ve stopped asking: what am I not seeing? 

Humility is the willingness to admit I might be wrong about who someone is. Curiosity is the willingness to find out. 

The machinery can’t run on humility and curiosity. It needs certainty. It needs the label to hold. 

This is what we work on at Ziel — not in the political arena, but in the spaces where it matters just as much. In teams where a colleague has been reduced to “the difficult one.” In organizations where an entire department becomes “the problem.” In leadership dynamics where someone’s worst moment becomes the only story we tell about them. 

The same machinery that operates at the national level operates in every meeting room, every Slack channel, every hallway conversation where we’ve decided we already know who someone is. 

The practices that interrupt it aren’t complicated. They’re just hard. 

Pause before the label lands. Notice when you’ve collapsed a whole person into one word — and ask what you’re not seeing. 

Stay curious when everything in you wants to dismiss. The moment you’re most certain about someone is usually the moment you understand them least. 

Hold your own compass. “They did it first” should never set your standard. The floor only drops when we let someone else’s behavior define ours. 

These aren’t political skills. They’re human ones. And they’re the foundation of what we call compassionate accountability — the capacity to hold people to high standards while still seeing them as whole, complicated, worthy of dignity. 

Our guide in Berlin stands in that museum every day and tells the truth — about his country, about his parents, about the machinery and how it works. Germany didn’t bury that history. They built on top of it. Not because it felt good, but because they learned that facing the worst of who you were is the only path to becoming who you want to be. 

I think Grant would call that humility. I’d call it compassionate accountability. Either way, it starts with the same admission: 

I don’t know as much as I think I do. About the other side. About my own side. About myself. 

The root of lifelong learning, Grant says, is knowing how little we know. 

The root of seeing each other again might be the same thing. 

Eyes open.