There is an art to ignorance.
No society before white civilization ever admitted ignorance. If they needed an explanation, somebody made up one. There were various ways of doing this. Some societies would have Wise Old Men come up with “the stars were put there by Googumbus in his pursuit of Cululi.” Others would have a shaman take some crazy weed so he could get “Out There” and come back with Revelations.
Odin, the Father-God of the Germans and Scandinavians, was the first god to admit he didn’t know. He hung on the World Tree and lost one eye, not for capitalized Truth, not for Wisdom, but just so he could know a few more facts.
When Christianity came along, it dragged the Old Testament with it from Middle Eastern civilization, so all the facts about everything were right there. There was no ignorance.
This idea that every preacher knows True Science is an alien idea, a throwback. The word “modern” is a throwback, too. It says that we now KNOW because we are modern. Political Correctness is a throwback. It says we KNOW because what we say is proper. The 60s hippies were throwbacks when they tried to learn the truth by going “Out There” with LSD. The New Agers are a throwback when they sit on their butts and find Truth inside their own skulls.
Albert Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to refute Heisenberg’s quantum theory, not because it wasn’t true, but because it didn’t FIT. Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Now there’s some real scientific objectivism in action!
You can only learn what you do not think you already know. That is why every other society stagnates, but the West has kept advancing. You have to clean out the crap first, you have to learn ignorance, and then you can advance into the empty areas.
As the Old Testament was pushed slowly and painfully out of the way, we began to learn ignorance again, slowly, painfully. A lot of people got burned alive for denying the Old Testament told us all we needed to know about the earth being the center of the universe and so forth.
We are the first society that, not only do we just flat out not know, but that we are going to find out.
But what do you do BEFORE you find out? How do you make decisions when there is so much you just don’t know? What do you do when there is no university professor and no screaming preacher and no Wise Man or Pope dressed up in the right outfit or a Talmud or a Koran to tell you all the Final Truths you need to know?
What do you do when you don’t know all the facts yet but you still have to make decisions?
That is the art of ignorance.
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