Vanquishing Ignorance

Vanquishing Ignorance

By Norman Livergood


The hideous visage of evil is clearly perceptible in our time. Behind it lurks the perpetual conspiracy of ignorance, threatening to overwhelm all noble elements of human culture. At present, the flood of ignorance endangers the very foundations of civilization.


Ignorance Kills

"Evil actions are the result of ignorance."

Plato

Ignorance is not merely the lack of knowledge, but self-destructive turning away from truth in all areas of life. Persons develop a taste for ignorance, the predisposition to embrace erroneous beliefs based on presumption or mere authority. The ignorant person believes he knows what he actually doesn't know; he becomes delusional. He is deranged.

We find it difficult to understand how people today deliberately refuse to look at what is actually happening in the world, believing the lies and distortions their leaders tell them. With a straight face, political, economic, religious, and media figures tell the people that black is white, war is peace, lies are truths, joblessness is economic recovery, ignorance is intelligence.

"While in our private life nobody except a mad person would remain passive in view of a threat to our total existence, those who are in charge of public affairs do practically nothing, and those who have entrusted their fate to them let them continue to do nothing.

"How is it possible that the strongest of all instincts, that for survival, seems to have ceased to motivate us? One of the most obvious explanations is that the leaders undertake many actions that make it possible for them to pretend they are doing something effective to avoid a catastrophe: endless conferences, resolutions, disarmament talks, all give the impression that the problems are recognized and something is being done to resolve them. Yet nothing of real importance happens; but both the leaders and the led anesthetize their consciences and their wish for survival by giving the appearance of knowing the road and marching in the right direction."

Erich Fromm. (1976). To Have or To Be?


Throughout history, ignorance has destroyed millions of lives:

* lives lost in idle pursuit of wealth and pleasure, with no thought for others

* lives lost in senseless wars

* lives lost in criminal actions by rulers

* lives lost because people cannot secure essential human necessities


Clearly, we must gain an understanding of this pandemic of ignorance. What is its nature? From where does it spring? How does it lead to evils of all kinds?

The Nature of Ignorance

Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, Francois Le Moyne, 1737 The worst feature of ignorance, Plato tells us, is self-satisfaction. "For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want." (Symposium)

Self-love, Plato recognizes, sees its own ignorance as wisdom; it seeks no cure, "the soul wallowing in the mire of every sort of ignorance and by reason of lust becomes the principal accomplice in her own captivity." (Phaedo) It will not let a more competent person perform what he can. Ignorance can only be overcome by an outside force of true wisdom.

Plato describes ignorance as the "greatest of diseases" and says that "the excessive love of self is in reality the source in each man of all offences; for the lover is blinded about the beloved, so that he judges wrongly of the just, the good, and the honorable, and thinks that he ought always to prefer himself to the truth." (Phaedo)

"The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themsleves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears."

Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving


Ignorance of the true value of things and people leads us to deal only with our illusions of these elements, not what they really are. We chase false values, wasting our lives, experiencing misfortunes brought on by incorrect thinking and behavior.

Plato distinguished clearly between "simple ignorance," the mere lack of information, and "double ignorance," the absence of knowledge coupled with the delusion of having genuine knowledge.

"Ignorance may be conveniently divided by the legislator into two sorts: there is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offences, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing."

Plato, Laws


The doubly ignorant person believes not only that he knows everything but that he can do everything. His ignorance keeps the truth from others and his incompetent assumption of authority keeps out those truly qualified to lead. Throughout human history--up to the present time--humankind has experienced the horror of rulers who are doubly-ignorant, destroying the very foundation principles of civilized society.



"And surely struggle against him we must in every possible way who would annihilate knowledge and reason and mind, and yet ventures to speak confidently about anything."

Plato, Phaedo



Through reliance on the preachments of others and on our own unfounded opinions, we construct a delusory physical and social world. Plato claimed that our customary consciousness constructs a confusing chimera--a world of illusion.


"What again shall we say of the actual acquisition of knowledge?--is the body, if invited to share in the inquiry, a hinderer or a helper? I mean to say, have sight and hearing any truth in them? Are they not, as the poets are always telling us, inaccurate witnesses? and yet, if even they are inaccurate and indistinct, what is to be said of the other senses?--for you will allow that they are the best of them?

"For in attempting to consider anything in company with the body she is obviously deceived."

Plato, Phaedo



It's difficult to understand just what Plato is getting at when he says our senses deceive us, creating a delusory world. Clearly, the ordinary universe of cabbages and kings and non-flying pigs is a coherent system to which we all consent, allowing us to build better bombs as well as more effective means of self-transformation.

Part of what Plato is referring to is that if we are to break through to a higher understanding, we must somehow stop this "big blooming buzzing confusion" (as William James called it) and leap to an entirely discontinuous mode of experience.

What Plato is speaking of is the dogmatic certainty we all share that our interpretation of reality is the only interpretation. We become so inured to consensus reality, that we're unable to discern its fabricated nature: a world put together by our minds out of sense impressions.

Plato points to the same element that appeared in the teachings of don Juan, in which Carlos Casteneda was forced to learn a new description of the world in a total sense and pit it against the old description, breaking the bewitchment of his ordinary sense of reality.

(continued below)

Employing extraordinary procedures when he interacted with people, Socrates stopped their world:

* encouraging them to see their ignorance of their own ignorance

* encouraging them to see the delusory nature of their sense world


Socrates A superficial reading of Plato's writings encourages the "learned" scholar to suppose that Socrates' claim that he was ignorant was merely a ploy, a pretense, nothing but word-play. Scholastics refuse to take seriously what Socrates himself said: that he possessed only the knowledge of what he did not know, that he had only the advantage of being aware of his own ignorance.

"As to my being a torpedo fish, if the torpedo fish stops his world as well as is the cause of stopping the world of others, then indeed I am a torpedo fish in your simile, but not otherwise; for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself."

Plato, Meno


Hercules Chasing Avarice from the Temple of the Muses, Ugo da Carpi, 1518 Socrates quite honestly believed that he was ignorant, because he was seeking not just knowledge but wisdom: the art of discovering what things really are, what are their true relationships, their true value, and living in harmony with this wisdom.

In the infinite realm of wisdom, it would be preposterous to think that one had ever reached the limit. A true seeker of wisdom reminds himself constantly that at an earlier stage he had assumed that he knew things of which he was actually ignorant. Also, he had assumed that he had reached the limit of what he could understand. He can expect a repetition of those experiences throughout his life. Each person, at whatever level of understanding he may be, must vanquish his own ignorance as he ascends the pathway to wisdom.


"I imagine that a few hundred years hence people will also discover in the intellectual ideas which we shall have left behind us much that is contradictory, and they will wonder how we put up with it. They will find much hard and dry husk in what we took for kernel; they will be unable to understand how we could be so short-sighted, or have failed to get a sound grasp of what was essential and separate it from the rest. Some day the knife will be applied and pieces will be cut away where as yet we do not feel the slightest inclination to distinguish. Let us hope that we may then find fair judges, who will measure our ideas, not by what we have unwittingly taken over from tradition and are neither able nor called upon to correct, but by what was born of our very own, by the changes and improvements which we have effected in what was handed down to us or was commonly prevalent in our day."

Adolf Harnack, What Is Christianity?


Achieving a glimpse of wisdom reveals how much more ignorance one has to overcome, how much more there is to understand and practice. Socrates could honestly say of himself that the range of his ignorance grew in proportion to the extent of his awareness.

Socrates produced a definite psychic upheaval in his fellow-conversationalists by helping them to see that they not only did not know what they thought they knew, they also were ignorant of their own ignorance in this regard.

A Perennialist sage met a ruler. The ruler said: "If you wish, you may ask a favor of me." The sage replied: "I cannot seek favors from a slave of my slaves." "How is that?" asked the ruler. The sage replied: "I have two slaves who are your masters: greed and self-love."

To immature people, someone helping them to become aware of their own ignorance doesn't seem to be help, but ridicule. Such assistance in recognizing their incorrect appraisal of themselves and the world seems to them a repudiation of their very selves and consequently terrible and unjustified.

Because contemporary "philosophy" is merely the husk of what it once was with Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, we find it difficult to realize that for Plato the search for wisdom was no mere intellectual pursuit but a total way of life. Each of Plato's dialogues was a part of his teaching in regard to the pursuit of wisdom; the Republic, for example, was the investigation into what was the best way for humans and nations to order their lives, and how the philosopher tries to bring about that state of affairs.

"It may not be uninteresting to observe that the validity of this Platonic theory on the essence of philosophy is in a way borne out even by experience. For if there is, as there is in fact, something like a brotherhood of true philosophers who, for all their disagreements with regard to particular questions, nevertheless feel drawn together as partakers in one and the same spiritual adventure, does this not indicate that the deepest thing in philosophy is not the conclusions that we may arrive at, but rather the very resolution to lead a philosophical life, i.e. the decision not to accept without examination any traditional beliefs and customs, but to try throughout to give an account before the tribunal of our moral and intellectual conscience for every step we may decide to take during our pilgrimage through this life?"

Hermann Gauss, Plato's Conception of Philosophy, 1974

Socrates Genuine seekers of wisdom possess a deep, sincere love of truth, relentlessly striving for it. This dedication to truth means that they do not accept any conventional belief or custom without examining it and determining if it has some form of verification or value.

They do not presume to have apprehended fully-formed, final truth, but are always "reaching forth unto those things which are before." Along with the love of truth, a true philosopher such as Socrates wages an unending struggle against error and ignorance wherever it's found.

Plato recognizes that there are some kinds of humans who have no interest in the search for wisdom:

* those who have already achieved wisdom, "whether Gods or men"

* those "who are ignorant to the extent of being evil"


Those who have need of philosophy are "those who have the misfortune to be ignorant, but are not yet hardened in their ignorance, or void of understanding, and do not as yet fancy that they know what they do not know." (Lysis)

The doubly-ignorant person not only views things in a distorted way but possesses no capacity for self-correction; no truth can get through the delusory mind-set. Delusion feeds on itself and becomes a totally closed system of egomania.


"But by far the worst feature of this 'double ignorance' is that, on the one hand, it stands in the way of its own cure, and on the other, if unchecked, it is constantly aggravating itself. For if we look at things with a distorted view, these things will present themselves to us in a distorted manner too; and thus, instead of reaping from our experiences new impressions which might help us in restoring a healthy spirit within ourselves, we shall only add nourishment to the ulcer within our mind. And on the other side, if we should try to cure our ignorance, we see that for so doing it is required that we look away from ourselves and from our habitual ways of thinking, which seems to us tantamount to a flat repudiation of our very selves and consequently impossible."

Hermann Gauss, Plato's Conception of Philosophy, 1974


Overcoming the Fatal Malady of Ignorance

Ignorance leads to death; the ignorant become like dead persons. This is no mere metaphor, as you discover by carefully observing persons who have committed themselves to ignorance and falsehood. They stumble through their phantom lives, their speech and behavior are incoherent and emotionally flattened. Embracing ignorance kills that element in humans which motivates them to turn to the truth and take pleasure in knowledge and learning.

(continued below)

"Knowledge is the life of the heart, which delivers it from the death of ignorance."

Thaqafi
(Perennialist adept)

The wise teacher is able to bring the ignorant back from the dead by showing them their fatal maladies which led them to embrace falsehood and deliberately turn away from truth. The teacher encourages persons overcome by ignorance to begin to investigate their fatal disorders and overcome them.

The very act of acknowledging their ignorance is the beginning of the recovery of a true life, recognizing that ignorance is a form of death. The teacher shows them how exciting and rewarding the discovery of truth can be and how enabling knowledge is. Only when these persons begin to recover, are they able to appreciate how ill they were.

"Give me more of this medicine because it has cured my malady, and my hope and desire to answer my problem is now intensified. And save me by your kindly treatment and your gentle wisdom from the confusion which you know so well to be hidden in my secret soul, from those deadly disorders concealed within me. In the past up till now there was concealed from me those hidden things within me which I denied. You have revealed them to me by your excellent description of them. . . .

"And with the limited knowledge at my disposal I realize how very much more there is to be known which I have not attained. There are recondite and hidden mysteries which I have neither seen nor known. So, O wise man, reveal to me my present spiritual state which you know better than I do. For surely the physician knows more about the ailment of the sick man than the sick man himself, and is in a better position to diagnose the cause of the illness and prescribe the treatment to cure him."
Junayd, Rasail



It is only if we understand ignorance in this light that we can feel its deadly force. Ignorance is not some harmless lack of the opportunity to gain information. It is, as Plato says, a fundamental corruption in which "all evils are rooted." In today's world, as has happened throughout man's past, we have the misfortune to see our culture being steadily destroyed by persons who are not only ignorant but whose ignorance has steadily corrupted them to the point of evil.



"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

Plato


The perfidious, destructive nature of ignorance is such that the beginning of a cure can only be administered through a very powerful psychic shock: the stopping of one's world.

This can sometimes come about, as with Socrates, through dialectic, when the person is confronted with his own delusions. He is made to see that what he believes he knows he does not actually know; that what he believes are truths are in fact delusions. This can sometimes produce sufficient psychic upheaval that it will stop his usual world of self-justification and presumptuousness.

Certainly, this kind of psychic shock from Socrates appears to have been what turned Plato's life upside down, leading him from a public life as an artist and a politician to a dedicated philosopher (seeker of wisdom). Socrates' single act of stopping Plato's world--providing him with the requisite psychic upheaval--is one of the most important accomplishments of this esteemed Perennialist teacher.

In the very process of searching for wisdom--the Golden Way of philosophy--seekers vanquish ignorance, learning how to respond to the challenges of their lives. The shock of recognizing their own ignorance awakens them to an awareness of the deeper realities of human existence.

But very often the only psychic shock that produces a stopping of the delusory world is catastrophe or crisis. As Benjamin Franklin reminded us, "Experience is a dear teacher, and only fools will learn from no other."

A striking example of people being shaken out of ignorance by catastrophe is the story of four wives of 9/11 victims: Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie van Auken. Recognizing they knew virtually nothing about how their government worked--Lorie says, "I must have slept through that civics class"--they informed themselves and became, for a short time, a formidable force for an investigation of the 9/11 tragedy.

"For the last 20 months they have clipped and Googled, rallied and lobbied, charmed and intimidated top officials all the way to the White House. In the process, they have made themselves arguably the most effective force in dancing around the obstacle course by which the administration continues to block a transparent investigation of what went wrong with the country’s defenses on Sept. 11 and what we should be doing about it. They have no political clout, no money, no powerful husbands—no husbands at all since Sept. 11—and they are up against a White House, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary, a National Security Advisor and an F.B.I. director who have worked out an ingenious bait-and-switch game to thwart their efforts and those of any investigative body."

Gail Sheehy, "Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush," New York Observer, November 2, 2003


In the case of these four brave women, catastrophe aroused them from some of their ignorance. Unfortunately, their awakening did not extend far enough, and they have now allowed themselves to be completely taken in by a fake investigation into the 9/11 tragedy.

We can only hope that America will shake itself from its present stupor and stop the destruction of Constitutional liberties that is now running rampant. It may be that Americans will only wake up 1 when the devastation of our nation and our world is 2 so far advanced that it can no longer be ignored.




I could not put this better myself, another great essay/article by Norman Livergood.

-Kdial1

Bravo. Very nice opening posts. I also am a student of Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers, and I could not agree more that the idea that Socrates was having some fun or being facetious when he claimed what he found made him wiser than others was that he knew he didnt know, is a mistaken one. I think, as you seem to, that therein lay not only the core of his own wisdom, but a guide for us all in the pursuit of our own.

In my own thinking about this subject, ignorance, denial and delusion, I have come to the conclusion that ignorance itself is only a symptom of an even greater "evil." It seems to me that underlying ignorance, particularly willful ignorance, is fear.

It seems to me that this is why the pursuit of reason alone will never be enough. Reason cannot soothe fear, they reside in different areas of the tripartite soul Plato describes. You do not feed the body with reason, it will not soothe hunger, and you cannot soothe the emotion of fear with reason either.

Plato actually recognized this, and in his training of his philosopher kings, they were reared in such a way as to avoid having fear in their hearts, in a sense preparing the soil of the soul to allow the seed of reason to grow. A fearful man cannot be a reasonable one. He cannot look at the fearful truths that others tell, and he is terrified also of the fearful truth within. That this fear is unfounded, and that the behaviors engaged in in avoidance of the feared thing are often the very ones that cause the fearful thing to manifest are of no consequence. Which is why, in my humble opinion, one can never succeed in showing someone out of the darkness of ignorance by creating more fear, but only by soothing it, and allowing the one trapped in ignorance the chance to see that there is not, nor has there ever been, anything to fear in themselves, in the world, and in the truth. Especially when the one trapped in ignorance is our own selves.

These facades of "expertise" that many feel compelled to wear as masks, stem from a fear that without them, they have no real value. No reason for others to like them, need them, value them. The way to lead them out of ignorance of the mind is to show them the value of their own being. The inherent value, that exists regardless what they do, what they know, or how much they own.

Greed, hatred, racism, war, all have their roots in fear. Fear of not having enough, and ultimately of not being enough. The thought that "I must hold on to what is mine," be it land, a lover, an idea, a position, are fear based responses that if one were stripped of these things, one would be at the mercy of some cruel and cold world, shunned socially, laughed at, mocked and exposed as valueless to all. Worst of all, to ones self.

Only through risking this, only through walking through the fire, through the death of the created "self" this ego, this identity, can one See, not think or believe, that ones value is inherent. When one can realize this, there is no risk in letting someone better than oneself at some task DO that task. There is no need to lead, when one is better at following, no need to mask inadequacies with gold, when one sees that one has real value.

A brave man or woman is not the one who feels no fear, but rather is that one who feels the fear, and acts despite it. Not because of it.

Nice post!

Basically it all sums up, that we live in a current society of people that are Ignorant which leads to fear. But there is hope, as author Adous Huxley stated, "Most ignorance is vincible ignorance." What this means is that someone intentionally refuses to understand a particular point of doctrine. As seen with the current elections, people are voting for a candidate purely out of Ignorance. Take a look at this video to show the ignorance.



This is also on my thread showing a comparison between different voters.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I still have hope that America will come out of this Ignorant state of mind they are in. As one of our current members put it, "Maybe the president should be elected based on the total IQ points of the people who vote for him/her. It would appear that Ron Paul has definitely captured the brains of the nation. Maybe his campaign is planting seeds for the future. I sure hope so.

Personally I've become very sour on America, but Ron Paul supporters give me hope. Maybe, just maybe, America can reach up to be the nation it once was, again."

-Kdial1

Yes. The video was a good illustration, but not surprising in any way.

For the most part, it would only be ignorance on our own part if we assumed the larger portion of humanity made decisions based on reasoning. In my own study of philosophy, this was a particular point of contention that I would raise with my professors regarding ethical theory particularly.

I have always argued that human beings, for the most part, are illogical and unreasonable. The assumption underlying much of ethical theory requires a rational human. I find none. I find instead an emotional creature, that rationalizes after the emotional decision has been made to justify that emotional response, rather than reason overriding emotion in decision making.

Fortunately for me, data is bearing this out. I only wish I had more of this as backup to my claims in college.

www.apa.org...

The researchers found that the brain areas responsible for reasoning did not show increased activity as participants drew their conclusions about the information. Instead, the brain areas controlling emotions lit up. Further, when participants had twisted the facts until they exonerated their candidate of choice, areas of the brain involved in reward-processing showed increased activity.

So, in essence, I wonder where the ignorance really lies. Could it be that those rational humans expecting the bulk of mankind to use reason are the ones most guilty of ignorance? Wishful thinking and denial of truth? Is it an uncomfortable truth that those reasonable humans are the ignorant ones after all? Projecting their own mindset blindly outward without a dispassionate look at that which is truly before them?

Certainly those rational creatures with a more Machiavellian bent have known and happily embraced this feature of humanity to pursue sometimes horrific policies. Hitler for instance, more recently the war on terror, but really, fill in the blank on that. Pick your issue and see if it was successfully sold via baiting of emotions rather than reason.

Plato did not feel democracy was the best form of governance. He recognized that reason, and making rational decisions was the domain of a very few. He also recognized that reason and rationality did not in any way imply "good." In fact, he clearly saw that without some miracle, (or tightly structured social form) those "natural philosophers" WOULD become corrupt by the system in which they were reared and would use reason to harm, not benefit, others. In the Republic he outlines some very few cases where a "philosopher" might somehow escape this outcome without his social construct.

Perhaps it is time to once and for all consider, reasonably, whether it is reasonable to expect rationality from the bulk of humanity at all. Perhaps to move forward with a plan that compassionately accepts humans as they really are, not as we wish them to be.