By Robert Graef
For The Herald
It took me four years of plowing through quotable sources to get a perspective on ignorance.
Some impressions: Ignorance is impressively huge, since all that the biggest brains know is dwarfed by what they don’t know; if humans are born as blank-slates, then ignorance is our native condition; if knowledge is power, then ignorance can leave one powerless — except when ignorance, itself, is allowed to become a base of power.
My book, “Ignorance; Everything You Need to Know About Not-Knowing,” begun before Donald Trump was nominated, wasn’t meant to be provide a look into his mind or the minds of his supporters. It just turned out that way as objective research into causes and effects of ignorance kept turning up surprising parallels to the phenomenon of the Trump presidency.
Rather, it was the breadth of ignorance-fueled fiascoes that triggered the project. Broadly, it was society’s need to better understand the dangers of ignorance that prompted the book. It was the socio-economic results of people voting against their best interests, how un-thinking spending patterns work against family stability and security, how ignorant national policies erode the Unites States’ standing among nations, why ignorance blinds us to attacks on the only ecosystem that sustains us.
It was ignorance of how special interests gain power and profit from holding populations ignorant. They do this by spreading the informational equivalent of smog that obscures our view while endangering our well-being. To bring this off, the Powers That Be hire mind-bending specialists that advertise themselves as “ballot-measure and issue managers.” One of those invaded the state of Washington to undo proposed action to label genetically modified foods by spreading 13 patent lies. By flooding media with truth-obscuring propaganda, they kept voters ignorant of the facts.
Because producers of truth-obscuring media campaigns are now the favorite tool of the Powers That Be, the public’s mind is under attack. Two new words had to be invented to describe the situation: ignoror and ignoree. Ignorors being those whose mission is to hold others in ignorance, and ignorees being those who are kept from understanding the facts.
Ignorors are students of a psychology that understand how to create paranoia with threats to self-interest. They understand that the less a person knows, the more fiercely they defend that meager bit of knowledge, right or wrong. They capitalize on the fact that the smaller one’s personal universe is, the greater their fears of what lies outside it.
Call these manipulators knowledge-controllers, for that’s what they do. Some operate as corporate specialists, such as Winner and Mandabach, the firm that torpedoed Washington’s GMO labelling initiative, or as the hundreds of politically slanted think-tanks that pump out free editorials for cash-strapped newspapers, or the public relations arms of the super-PACs that influence so much of today’s legislation.
But ignorance of what’s necessary thrives outside politics also. It is built into institutional bigness since size inhibits timely change. Just so, it hampers corrective change in government, education, the military, and huge infrastructures such as power distribution and transportation. Even corporate giants such as General Motors and General Electric have been caught up in the knowledge-denial of institutional inertia.
Media isn’t immune. To the degree that media strays from unbiased presentation of the news and issues of the day, they hold the public ignorant of what matters. Because of how they stray, they polarize vulnerable audiences into their sponsors’ political camps. Meanwhile, to keep channels of information open, they necessarily play nice with their sources by reporting what makes them happy instead of delivering the straight scoop. And sometimes they even support bad science when doing otherwise would put income from advertising at risk; think cigarettes.
Politics may be thought as the mother-lode of ignorance for it practices and spreads not-knowing more vigorously than any other entity. Because of the degree to which national politics is steered by and answers to vested interests, it serves as the figurehead for a shadowy oligarchy. What it teaches us is not what is, but truth-warping obfuscations such as a Clean Air Act that ensures dirty air, or a Citizens United court ruling that handed management of legislation to the Powers That Be while diminishing the effect of thinking citizens’ votes. These things are made to happen by careful management of what the public is allowed to know.
It is impossible to estimate the cost of ignorance. Surely, some must arise from environmental disasters that are, at least in part, influenced by man-made factors. Add the cost of procrastination when escalation of costs over time is predictable. Without a doubt, if an industry was organized to clean-up for ignorance-fueled mishaps, it would be the biggest industry in the land.
But there is another side to ignorance. While things go sour when people deny their ignorance, admission of ignorance paves the way to success through minimizing errors. Not only that, if, when faced with a new challenge, one strips away any tendency to think, “Well, the way we once did something like this we…” then all thinking can address the specifics of the new project.
During WWII, Henry Kaiser, who had never before built a ship, milled out hundreds of freighters in record time and minimal expense by admitting his ignorance, setting aside outmoded methods and looking at the challenge with fresh eyes.
The nation needs to consider its own ignorance. When warnings from the scientific community are ignored; when leadership of government’s most technical arms is handed over to know-nothing political loyalists, the issue of ignorance-in-action needs our attention.
Robert Graef is the author of “Ignorance; Everything You Need to Know About Not-Knowing.” He is a former journalist, teacher and business owner and lives in Lake Stevens.
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