Foundry of Reason

“Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is tragedy. Ignorance is devastation. Ignorance creates lack. Ignorance creates disease. Ignorance will shorten your life. Ignorance will empty your life and leave you with the husks, nothing to account for.” – Jim Rohn

The willingness to disregard information, situations, research, facts, and truth for the sake of retaining an immediate feeling of comfort or satisfaction with maintaining a certain perception of reality has killed millions of people and it lies at the forefront of human behavior.

Ignorance in numbers

On a macro scale, history can show us how acts of ignorance have been a deadly force. The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852) was initially provoked by a potato blight, but its effects were exacerbated by British laissez-faire policies of neglect and an abysmal form of  ignorance regarding the nature of the famine’s root causes. The British government’s negligence to provide adequate relief, compounded by their dismissal of the suffering, led to the death of over a million people from starvation and disease and the exodus of over two million. Instead of willfully ignoring the Irish, had the British government heeded to its own poverty-stricken tenants and acted appropriately to the situation, 25% of the Irish population at the time would have not succumb to their fate or have been forced to emigrate out of hopelessness.

The largest atrocity allowed in history due to a mass of willfull ignorance is The Holocaust. Even with reports of mass shootings and deportations, a large number of the German population chose to stay uniformed about the atrocities taking place. This phenomenon also extended into Nazi occupied Poland, France, and The Soviet Union, where its citizens also chose to ignore the massacres and round-ups of the Jewish people. Beyond just civilian life at the time, the Nuremburg Laws of 1935 allowed the persecution of Jews and other minority groups. Though largely debated, there was no opposition to the implications the laws enacted. Instead, they were overlooked for “national security” purposes. A program called The Nazi T4 program proves another example of deadly ignorance. Starting in secrecy but later becoming public knowledge, the program involved the murder of people with physical and mental disabilities. Again, a blind eye was turned or justified at the time simply as “mercy killings.” The examples of purposeful ignorance during the Nazi Regime are endless and provide us with a collection of historical events to point to and criticize.

Why choose ignorance?

Being able to criticize governments or mass amounts of people for making detrimental mistakes in history is the prerequisite for being able to criticize the individual. For instance, during the Nazi Regime, it’s easy to say that one would look the other way for the sake of personal safety or group think. To be able to blend in with the rest of the crowd or safety in numbers is a survival instinct instilled in human behavior. But when pulled out of these extreme senerios of tyranical regimes, famines, war, etc., people still act in the same way where the survival instinct seems unnecessary.

On the surface level, we choose willful ignorance nearly every day. Simple actions such as not researching spoilers to our favorite books or not reading the manual of a blender for preference to find out for ourselves. These are very basic levels of ignorance are easily explainable through our mesolimbic dopamine systems in which we seek a sort of challenge through trial and error of working a blender or having the discipline to read through a book to pacify our curiosity. These types of willful ignorance are hardly ignorance at all but still build the foundation for the following stage. We still choose ignorance when it could technically be deemed unnecessary to do so.

In essence, on a large scale, people will decide to be ignorant for the sake of safety, group think, survival, and polociy adherence. On a micro scale, people decide to be ignorant for the experience of reward and satisfaction. Neither of which are perfect. On the macro scale, there is a sweeping-array of issues that stem far beyond ignorance, but the root causes could be the middle ground.

The birth of comfort in ignorance

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Within the self, there is a putrid desire for comfort. When we feel comfortable, similar to the micro scale ignorance, our brains release the feel-good dopamine. And like the macro scale ignorance, the desire to feel comfortable is driven by our survival instinct to prioritize security and saftey. With both mechanisms of the macro and micro at play, the breeding ground for the pursuit of comfort takes place.

This is the zone in which we ignore our destructive behaviors, avoid difficult conversations, and dismiss personal reflection. The ego or sense of self takes control. When we become challenged by others or ourselves, it takes us out of our state of security and familiarity and into the unknown, open to criticisms and truth. Even though we may know our belief systems or moral compasses could use realignment, we purposefully ignore all the necessary reflection for sake of ease and harmony. When we pretend like everything is great, it is. Ignorance is bliss. Needless to say this is far from the truth.

The truth is that when we self reflect, have difficult discussions, acknowledge destructive behavior, we grow. In the growing, we increase our resilience, enhance creativity, build confidence, create opportunities, become adaptable, improve problem solving, increase empathy, and the list is endless. All of these improvements create nuclear moral structure and a natural desire for knowledge and wisdom. In the macro ignorance issues, if the people in charge of said issues have put the work in to hone these skills by doing the uncomfortable tasks, it would undoutably change the course of history for the better.

The biggest issue we face in the modern day is distraction and poor media structure. Between being force-fed everything your dopamine systems wants to hear by broadcasters’ attention grabbing semantics and being able to turn on Netflix to drown out the background noise of failure to acknowledge what is known subconsciously or worse consciously, we live in a never ending cycle of hell that’s rooted right to the core.

It tends to take a major life event or even a crisis to be pulled out of this cycle if you’re fortuitous enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For most, it seems a major life event or crisis deepens the roots of ignorance for them to never be ripped out and replanted with the seed of awareness.

The destruction of self is an ongoing and ever worsening problem with humanity, and it lies in the genesis of our very being. While we drown ourselves in the vast ocean of illusion and comfort, we miss the mark on how to live meaningful lives. The sole purpose of life itself lies in pools of responsibility. Without responsibility, there is nothing meaningful. Do what’s hard, take on responsibility, and change the world one less willfully ignorant person at a time.