There Are None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See

The proverb in the title continues, "The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know." The biblical saying first appears in English in 1546, in "The Proverbs of John Heywood."

In the early 1860s a political movement called the Know-nothings emerged in the United States. Their philosophy was in fact not one of ignorance. The name stemmed from their desire to keep the party more or less secret; when a member was asked anything about it he would respond "I know nothing."

The phrase, however, resounds in a tendency in this country to value ignorance.

I have lately been contemplating a pair of epigrams that encapsulate our ambivalence toward learning. On one hand we say "Knowledge is power," but on the other, "Ignorance is bliss." The dichotomy is difficult, if not impossible to reconcile.

Don't we all seek power in some form? We are a competitive species; we seek to overcome others in school by getting better grades; in sports by scoring more points; in business by making more money or having a more prestigious office location. Each of those requires knowledge and understanding, whether of an academic discipline, a playbook or a corporate strategy.

But don't we all also seek bliss? We scrimp and save for Fantasyland vacations, we spend thousands on computer gaming and virtual reality systems and dream of winning the lottery, all to the end of shedding stress, relieving ourselves of work related concerns and trying, as The Beatles sang, to "turn off your mind, relax and float down stream."

Such scenarios, however, do not in themselves imply ignorance. Indeed, we have to work to earn money to get a little bliss, and working implies knowledge of something.

Who, then, can achieve bliss through ignorance? Let's define ignorance. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary it is "lack of knowledge, education, or awareness." Blissfulness results from not having to worry; if one knows nothing, one has nothing to worry about.

If bliss is the absence of worry and stress it follows that there is also absence of thought, as worry and stress are byproducts of thought. Having no thoughts implies the inability to think, which I doubt sounds blissful to most of us.

Still, there are some among us who are able to achieve a bliss-like state not through absence of thought but through wholesale denial of reality. They believe that problems will go away if they don't think about them; they deny their existence then deny the denial; they flout rules that they don't like; they operate outside normative behavior, and they answer to no one. 

They are Heywood's "most deluded people . . . who choose to ignore what they already know."

And they are in charge of this country.


--- Diogenes, 4/28/20