"I know nothing"- why willful ignorance is making us dumber than ever

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”― Plato

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”― Soren Kierkegaard

In the classic sitcom Hogan's Heroes, a bumbling German guard named Sgt Schultz was a popular character who survived by his willful ignorance. Hogan and his prisoners of war were running a series of covert operations to win the war from the POW camp, and the only German who noticed was Schultz. To save his own skin from being sent to the Russian front, he exclaimed "I know nothing, I see nothing," whenever an obvious plot was about to unfold. Schultz was played by John Banner, an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis in World War 2 and enlisted in the US Army.

Many of us pretend to think we know enough, but when things become inconvenient or dangerous, we lapse into Sgt Schultz mode. Willful ignorance is different than regular ignorance, where we don't know what we don't know. In willful ignorance, at least a part of us knows something could be true, but we choose to ignore it for a variety of reasons. Maybe it would require too much change. Or it could be too painful to think about. We know that there's something there, but our ego and mind work overtime to bury unpleasant knowledge before it disturbs our assumptions and models. In an age of unlimited information coming at us from all directions, is willful ignorance a survival mechanism?

For example, many of us are aware at least a little about where processed meats come from, that clothes we wear could be made by children in sweatshops, that our government is corrupt, or that climate change is real. We choose not to invest too much energy into looking at these inconvenient truths the same way the German citizens of Schultz's time refused to look into the rumors of the Holocaust. It's too dangerous and too disturbing to even imagine.

Instead, we make excuses. Maybe the animals have a nice life before they get slaughtered, or the kids would starve if it weren't for our clothes, i-phones, or precious metals. And sure the government is corrupt, but the people I vote for are the good ones and problems are always someone else's fault.

Motivated reasoning is behind so many of our cognitive biases. Confirmation bias keeps us from being curious to explore alternate realities. The Dunning- Kruger effect is even worse- it helps us to feel smugly confident with just a little information, while we remain blissfully ignorant of the vast majority of reality that we don't understand or want to. And the backfire effect makes it so that even when confronted with information that conflicts with our viewpoints, we cling ever tighter to those viewpoints and see new information as a threat to our very identity.

There are different levels of willful ignorance. Some, like fossil fuel companies or cigarette companies are very aware of the drawbacks to their products, but choose to ignore it to save their bottom line. They even poison the discussion with doubts and disinformation to keep confuse consumers. There will always be those who withhold or manipulate information for their own benefit, and the only antidote is a free press and government regulations.

A more common type of ignorance lies with the rest of us. We like to think that we are good people, but there's always some kind of reality that challenges that assumption. We look the other way too often when confronted with inconvenient truths. But to confront all of them at once is overwhelming to our imperfect brains. Still, as human beings our chief duty in this life is to learn from our mistakes and expand our understanding as much as we can. We do a great job of this during childhood and adolescence, but fall into the trap that the world is what it is once we reach adulthood. Then we start to resist change, new ideas, and unpleasant facts when they present themselves.

It's said that opening a closed mind is much harder than closing an open one. Cult leaders use a number of tools to take a trusting person and convert them into a "know-nothing" follower. It can take deprogrammers years to treat a cult member because the mind has powerful defenses that protect entrenched beliefs, including the biggest one- no one likes to admit that maybe they were wrong.

In a way, humanity, for all of its vast stores of knowledge, still understands a tiny fraction of the world that we inhabit. Our knowledge has opened doors, but also caused unintended consequences. That's why humility and curiosity are essential to anyone wanting to venture from the safety of know-nothingism. Great minds like Galileo, Einstein, Buddha, Plato, and George Carlin have done more for expanding our understanding of life than a million Sgt Schultzes.

I know something. Not everything, but more than I knew a year ago. More than anything, I want to understand this crazy world we live in so I can figure out how to make it better. Join me and let's figure this out.

Two movies- The Matrix, and They Live, showed how a main character transforms their world by being willing to see things as they really are. I recommend seeing them with this idea in mind. Also Hogan's Heroes is worth a look for laughs at the Nazi's expense.