5/17/2007 Vertigo And The Comfy Ignorance

5/17/2007 Vertigo And The Comfy Ignorance

My disease lingers. Yesterday I made the mistake of trying to make up some time at work. I came home dog-tired and with the massive headaches that I get when I go long periods without eating and then drink a lot of diet coke. Still didn't get to bed early, though, and I am tired again today. I long for the weekend. I have to miss classes because of this, too, and I think now that I should take online classes to mitigate the pain off them due to the capriciousness of my nature.

Anyway, I am thinking today about ignorance. We all think that we are not ignorant, don't we? We all think that all the problems in the world come from ignorance, right? Racism, war, the other party getting elected, pot holes, people who change lanes without signaling, people who don't believe in God, people who do, people who believe in gun control, people who don't. We all blame everything on the ignorance of others.

The most obvious example of this is conservative radio. It's not hard to understand politics, right? Teachers vote for the pro-union party, gays vote for the gay rights party, rich white guys vote themselves a tax cut. Yet all these white guys go on the radio and wail about how anyone could ever disagree with them, insisting that voting in their best interests in the right thing to do and everyone else is just ignorant or confused.

Listen to people talk. All of us are such students of human nature! We all think we have each other figured out. I am reading excerpts today of Reagan's diary. It astounds me how one can ascend to the presidency and maintain such an immature view. I can only hope that these diaries are strictly for publicity. Reading them, one might get the impression that Ronny and Nancy were Christlike figures, the only people on earth intent on finding the right thing and doing it. He is always the only one who sees the right thing and does it just because it's right. Everyone else is ruled by self interest, greed, evil, confusion; and then they don't listen to him when he tries to set them straight. Such childlike innocence! His bear in the woods was truly a case of children manipulating infants; stoking their fears to gain power.

The most elementary realization of the knowledge of human nature turns out to be rare, and I'll guide anyone through it who wants to go. It only involves the imagination, that wonderful tool that we all have, and that we all use, for better or worse. It is the only tool that lets us see past this world of the senses that we all live in, and as such, is the only true window into the real world, albeit an foggy one at times. Here goes: I want you to go back into your memory. Think about the person who said the worst things about you of anyone you can remember. The very worst criticism you can recall. This should be specifically a criticism of your ill-intent or general character rather than an accusation of a crime, per se. Then I want you to sit down and list at least ten reasons that this person was right. These must all be reasons that you believe are right, morally and in terms of accuracy. And finally, you must do absolutely nothing to correct it. Step two: try to remember the worst things you ever said about someone else. This, again, must be some character flaw rather than some bad action. Then think about what the correlation would be in your life. For example, if you accuse someone of being selfish because they drink too much and screw up, the correlation in your world might be that you eat too much or sleep around. Then I want you to write ten ways in which you might have hurt people with your vice. Lastly, you now need to write down at least five instances in your life in which someone else has dismissed you by assigning a character flaw to you. An example of this is telling someone that “you only disagree with me because you are ignorant”, or telling a conservative that they only vote the way they do because they are rich and white, or telling a black person who is effected by racism that they are “playing the 'race card'”. But for you, try to find more personal examples from someone who knew you. Then I want you write down for each dismissal some way in which you have dismissed someone else for similar reasons. Then I want you to imagine what they were saying. Finally, and this is important, imagine what was the worst possible thing they could have said to you. What were they getting at that you had to cut them off? And think of why they would have hurt you so.

The realizations that come from these exercises will be two, but they are really one. First, quite obviously, is that you are ignorant. Ignorance is rampant, you are no different than anyone in that regard. The second realization is not so easy, but will come in time. That is that human beings are completely and permanently motivated by fear. We don't always realize this because we spend our whole lives building up defenses. One of the primary defenses we build is that of right and wrong. Not only is right and wrong a set of rules that we all agree to live by, and something that keeps us safe from being physically hurt as well as letting us know what we can get away with, but it can also defend us from the truth. So often the truth is met with accusations of cruelty. So often accusations of cruelty mark truth. What hurts more? Any fact, or observation, that is painful is often deemed ethically wrong. You only said that to hurt me. But it goes even deeper than that; for there is nothing we fear more than our own ignorance. Imagine, while you are sitting there reading this, if you're car were not there when you went out to it? Or if the floor under you suddenly didn't hold? What if gravity ceased to function and we all drifted off into the vacuum of space? What I am saying is that in order to live our lives, we have to count on certain things, that things behave in a certain way. We base our lives on these rules and expectations: without them, we lose everything. To use these rules, we must be aware of them. That's why we are all amateur psychologists, amateur sleuths, amateur politicians, amateur prophets. (Of course, there are professional psychologists, politicians, etc, but calling them amateurs is more appropriate to even their level of knowledge.) And I mean all of us. And what that means is, by the time we are adults, we have a vast network of assumptions, expectations, and theories, all of which is based on our ignorance. So to realize our ignorance is to realize the worst of our fears. Things really are the way we were afraid they would be. Unfortunately, like anything else, this yields little in terms of anything that would lead to constructive action. You cannot rid yourself of fear because you realize it is blinding you. Nor can you give up your values because you realize they are based on ignorance. Nor should you try to stop figuring out the world and exploit it's rules.

What there is, now, left to live for is your problem. The point is that now you have a basic understanding of your ignorance. Never again will you offend a more enlightened person by portraying yourself as Reagan did, an innocent lamb in a den of thieves. You now possess, also, a rare quality: the ability to listen. You are now ready to embark on journey to attain elementary knowledge of human nature, which is the same as the world around you. If you ever get there, get ready to live in a lonely place. Ignorance, after all, is not necessarily bliss, but it is nice and comfy.