Ignorance is Certainty
It never ceases to amaze me how the ignorant are always so certain, and the informed are always questioning.
Of course social media has provided an almost unchallengeable platform to the ignorant…and that just makes them even more right.
Ignorance can be a good thing if it is accompanied by an open mind. That creates questioning, investigating, listening, and balancing facts. Unfortunately however this requires us to identify that caveman “fight or flight” part of our brain.
What I mean by that is that when we have an opinion, and someone has a different opinion to us, we often feel the need to justify our opinion, because that will make me stronger than the other person and hence, I will survive. Please don’t dismiss this as some sort of hippie crap, the fight or flight response is as real as you are sitting in your room reading this blog. Its our natural defence mechanism to be the biggest and strongest, its what has kept humans alive and has been a major part of our evolution for hundreds of thousands of years.
We recognise the fight or flight response in modern times as stress, anger, depression. It has become an emotional battle instead of a physical battle. Peoples unfettered opinions on social media, designed to defend their opinion of a subject at all costs.
So opinion combined with a closed mind becomes ignorance. Then we feel the need to defend our opinion, and the more vigorously we defend, the more right we convince ourselves we are.
Can you recognise this in yourself? Try just observing others opinions without judgement. If you can do that you will start to see what I mean.
