Is ignorance bliss?

[hyphenate]

It's gotten really difficult to show outrage any more. After five plus years, my ability to continue to show shock at some of the crimes of this administration are waning. All I can do is shake my head and add the data to an already overflowing filing cabinet in my brain.

We suffer so much from too much information. It gets harder and harder to keep our sanity intact with that much overload. And until the beginning of the 20th century, this was never such an overwhelming problem. Until the information age gave us the knowledge of the entire world, perhaps we were better off in our little corner of the globe, not knowing how so much terror, horror and emotional upheaval existed elsewhere.

Would we be better off with less knowledge? Would we be able to function better with self imposed ignorance of many events that happen in the world? In the old days of mythology, there were god and goddesses who shared the burden of areas where there was supposed to be too much information. The Fates, for example, didn't watch you from birth to death--there was one to take care of you to birth, another to watch you over the years of your life, and another who cut the string of your life when it came time for you to die.

In our modern world, up until the end of the 19th century, people actually had great parties to welcome travellers who have been in other parts of the world, and to hear their stories of these places. And even then, the travellers were never full experts on the cultures they visited, but they were never expected to be.

I think that was also good for another reason--we had respect for people of other cultural backgrounds because we didn't know everything we need to know, and we made no excuses for it. We could be properly respectful of them, and not carry a lot of preconceived notions around with us.

Nowadays, we travel with a huge amount of hubris, taking our prejudices and other hang-ups with us, and don't take the time to appreciate everything in other cultures. We seem to think we know more about a lot of other cultures through these routes of information, but in fact, we don't--it only looks that way. But few take the time to research their travel destinations and learn to understand what makes each people unique. We seem to concentrate on the similarities, without embracing the differences.

If we could stop this arrogance, stop our endless "need" to know everything, and simply face the fact that our brains and minds were never designed to carry so much all the time, perhaps we would have less stress and less hang-ups about things.

I guess it's nice to know that halfway around the world people are dying, that people are being killed on a daily basis, that children are being killed in some societies just because they are female, that men torture and kill women in some cultures because they enjoy holding this stranglehold on women, and that many beautiful wild animals are killed each day, leading the way to extinction and so on and so forth, but I wonder.......would we be better people if we never knew this? Would we be more respectful of others in the world if we knew less about them? I think we might be able to return to a more mannerly society if we didn't force ourselves to know everything there was about everything in the world, because there is no way anyone can hold that much knowledge without the requisite wisdom on how to use it and when to use it.

[Warpy]

1. Here you go, an article just for you

but one that describes all too many folks out there all too well: http://www2.lingsoft.fi/~reriksso/competence.html

Ignorance, or incompetence, may indeed be bliss, but that sort of bliss is unattainable by the knowledgeable and competent.

[niyad]

3. gee, one would almost think they were describing *

[hyphenate]

4. Very true

It takes one humble enough to recognize that they can never know it all to have the wisdom to say it openly.

I do agree that those who show little wisdom do tend to overestimate their knowledge, and I find those who are revered as wise know that all knowledge is unattainable.

I think this is one of the reasons many doctors, for example, end up being specialists--there is just too much medical technology at present to be able to be a fully competent general practitioner. A GP needs to know a little about a lot of things, while a specialist can know a lot about a few specific things.

However, I do cling to the notion that constantly being exposed to worldwide news on the scale that we currently do is damaging to us. It increases the amount of stress we have, and will often fill us with the futility that there is very little we can do about a lot of it. We are not capable of stopping all the horror in the world on our own, but if we can learn to regulate the amount of information we get, and filter it to our own areas of interest and expertise, we would feel a lot better about what we can do, and how to go about changing things. We wouldn't have to be a sponge that needs to take it all in, but we would be better able to understand those areas in which we can help.

[Democrats_win]

2. Another problem: people forget. Explains educated conservatives.

They forgot a lot. We say it's climbing the laddder of success and pulling it up after you. Sometimes its simply forgotten through atrophy, other times, willfully.

[hyphenate]

5. I would say it's willingly

Because if you have seen some of the horror in this world, it's very difficult, if you have a conscience, to forget the faces on those who have suffered tremendous loss. There is so much unhappiness in the world, though, that sheltering yourself against it all is just as bad as never having knowledge of it in the first place.

[BlooInBloo]

6. Not for those who have to deal with the consequences...

... hence ignorance is selfish.

[WillyT]

7. No... Because Then Republicans Would Look Like This...

Sorry...


:rofl:

[renate]

8. I've been thinking about this lately

I don't necessarily think ignorance is bliss--or not a healthy kind of bliss, anyway--but I don't think it's particularly wise to feel obliged to know about every horrendous thing in the world, either.

I sometimes take stock of how I spend a good chunk of my leisure time, catching up on the news and, mostly, reading DU. There are such funny and brilliant and passionate people here, and I love that and feel energized by that. But there are also really infuriating things happening that I read about and can't do anything about, and I often feel utterly angry and depressed and discouraged and almost hopeless, which isn't healthy at all. I realize that, yet I somehow feel obliged to know what's going on, because I don't want to be a mindless, self-absorbed, "as long as I've got mine," "ignorance is bliss" kind of person.

I would never support turning a blind eye, as people did during the Holocaust and during genocides around the world, when something could be changed for the better as a result of learning unpleasant knowledge--for example, I wish the famine in Darfur were on the news every single day, because hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved if the world decided that letting people die of starvation was unacceptable. But even though I feel guilty about wanting to shut out bad news for a while, it does come as a relief when I do. Every once in a while I go away for a couple of days to a house with no TV, not even a radio, and I don't read the papers, and it is unbelievably healing and peaceful.

I'm not sure whether the original post was about being blissfully ignorant of other cultures or about what's going on newswise, but I do think it's good and healthy sometimes to take a break from the real world, at least for a while. Lazy? Selfish? Maybe. Does it head off burnout or despair? Probably.