The False Idol of Knowledge
October 10, 2022Growing up, I would often say: We are all ignorant.
Whoever was in earshot immediately appeared offended, jumped in to defend their own knowledge and all the knowledge we can and indeed should gain so we are not so ignorant.
While I love learning and value education (both because I enjoy it and because it can create desirable changes in how we live and how we treat each other), none of this changes the fact that we are all ignorant.
And this is an idea that makes most of us horribly uncomfortable. We don’t like not knowing, and the possibility that this is our natural state and that there is a base futility to knowledge is something we are constantly trying to fix. We are searching again and again for answers, understanding, and certitude.
But as we do, we fall deeper and deeper into a state of illusion about our acquired knowledge. We convince ourselves that the more we know, the more we know.
We believe that knowledge is real and true, and many of us pursue it with a vigorous devotion akin to kneeling at the altar of God (or we simply stop at the altar and accept the knowledge it claims to offer).
Then, we take our “knowledge,” and we use it as both a weapon and a shield. We turn that which we know to be true into judgments that we use against others while simultaneously protecting ourselves from fear of the unknown or even worse—fear of being wrong—with our sense of righteous certainty.
Knowledge often assumes righteousness—a belief that the information you have gained is indeed objectively true—but this assumes that we are living in a world where objective truth (a) exists and (b) is accessible via human perception.
These two foundational assumptions can neither be denied nor verified, and knowledge itself cannot be proven to exist beyond the realm of human experience.
Imagine—if you will—that there is a large circle and in this circle is whatever is actually real and true.
Imagine that you are living inside the circle, and now, imagine that all other people are living inside the circle with you.
Each individual person has a circle above their heads that is full of “what they know.” And now imagine that all of these individual circles are connected like a tunnel running across the head of every person on Earth. Information is flowing through this tunnel like a river of “knowledge,” but there’s no way to prove that the river is actually the same as the large circle in which we all live or that such a circle even exists.
Knowledge—at its best—is a hypothetical reflection of objective truth, and at its worst, is purely a creation of human consciousness (and its interaction with what is experienced as an external reality).
I have often thought that experiences of psychic awareness are evidence of the fact that people are (or can be) connected to all knowledge, that we can access every piece of information that exists in the world—not just through the internet—but by tuning into this interconnected river of flowing information. And my many, many years of experiencing this makes me believe that this is true, but at the same time, I don’t know what this river is, and I recognize that the river itself and what it holds may be an illusion.
We both can access all knowledge, and we have no way of knowing if knowledge itself is anything more than a construction of our own making. We can know everything and nothing at all.
We are all ignorant.
So rather than strive fruitlessly towards attaining knowledge and truth, let us rest in the beauty of uncertainty, the mystery of all we do not know and cannot explain, and let us know that this actually applies to everything.
And that, that is beautiful and magical and mysterious and most importantly, it is enough.
It must be.
Because it is all we will ever have.
