On Ignorance as Bliss and Why We should not feel Recrimination For it.

On Ignorance as Bliss and Why We should not feel Recrimination For it.

 

Let me begin by making clear that the “Ignorance” that I am referring to, in this instance, is not the Ignorance that I had referred to previously as the Will to Ignorance. That use of the word Ignorance most precisely delineated a “will to perpetuate the Old”. This kind of Ignorance that I am about to discuss refers to a higher kind of Ignorance.

 

I was visiting the Rancho Bernardo High School Speech and Debate team as a volunteer, and I could not help noticing a bin full of newspapers in the classroom wherein the meeting was held. The newspapers were none other than the student newspaper, and I was drawn to an article in the “Opinions” section. Two students had written on one topic: Is Ignorance Really Bliss? The one writing in affirmation of this question wrote a very sentimental piece about the joys of being innocent and unaware of unpleasant facts that could create stress, et cetera. His opponent wrote, with harsh realism and even cynicism, about the necessity of coming to terms with the world maturely and responsibly, rather than staying on one end of a bridge, unable to cross over from naivete and childhood into the realisation of the grim “truths” of adulthood.

 

This had haunted me for some time, not because I did not know my opinion, but because I did not know how to answer. I was opposed to the latter boy, yet I could not explain precisely WHY I would ever be a proponent of Ignorance. I could not explain my sentiment in a way that was nearly as convincing as this gentleman had described it.

 

Yet now I can.

 

Clinging to an ideal is done, I think, not as a goal but as a symptom. The notion of Cognitive Dissonance would suggest to us that we perpetuate a dead or childish ideal for its own sake, or by virtue of a complex. In order to keep believing in something, one acts in such a way as to find corroboration for one’s belief. This is destructive fanaticism.

 

Yet this I do not believe to be the condition of the psyche at all.

 

In fact, I should say that acting with an ideal as a goal may be neurotic at any moment. I would like to postulate that ideals are not goals but symptoms. Ideals are also at once both truths and illusions.

 

When one is young, there is no such thing as a truth. There is only an experience. One has a number of impulses whose “reality” cannot be questioned, simply because they predate the socialisation which can call anything into question. When acted upon by an effort of will, certain impulses are Affirmed. They become Actions. The knowledge of having performed an action is retained as a memory. Repetition of such actions creates an increasingly complex system of memories. When one wishes to justify one’s present action according to these memories, either to oneself or to others, these memories become ideals.

 

When ideals are communicated, they are represented in language. If others which to express agreement with one’s self, regardless of the uniqueness of their circumstance, the ideals, which are now verbal instead of mental, become Truths.

 

Imagine the predicament of a Fascist state. The “Truth” therein is the ideology of the state. Anyone who is “ignorant” of this “truth” must thereby be “made aware of it”. In the process of being made aware of it, the possibility of living without this Absolute Truth is forgotten. Also is forgotten the fact that the Truth actually depends on people believing in it, or being aware of it, in order to function.

 

It is possible that all Truths are such constructs. No matter how civilised we become, however, there is always a reserve of the psyche which is free from the conditioning. Consider the problem of the Sinking House*, a situation I delineated previously. I may construct a Powerpoint with twenty slides. I may have slides 10 through 15 be blue. I could ask a person to count the number of blue slides. One would usually say “six”. Some people may err and say “five” by simply subtracting 10 from 15, ignoring that 10 itself was blue. Yet imagine that a person is an amnesiac. This person would be unable to discern, with the same sense of Certainty that the others employ, that there are six blue slides. This would be because the amnesiac, if he or she suffers from “severe” short-term memory loss, would be unable to know, by the end of counting the slides, where he or she started. This would be necessary to attain certainty, of course, that the count had not been a miscount.

 

This is not the case only with the amnesiac. People are daily capable of encountering this problem. One may suddenly find that one is not certain, but only dimly aware, of what one had been thinking of mere seconds before. We are so accustomed often to the notion of our world and of our minds as though these were fixed entities that we forget how fleeting thoughts are. If this happens several times within one moment whilst one is attempting a kind of computation, one is in the predicament of the Sinking House. One fears for one’s Sanity, when in fact a perfectly natural event is occuring.

The ego possesses memories and can arrange them in terms of a style of logic. The Unconscious, however, is not motivated by logic but by Meaning. It also happens to be in control of which memories are available to the ego. This is why one can remember a dream with sterling detail upon awaking but forget it within hours. It is not that one is going mad; the unconscious simply sees no need for the ego to remember. In the absence of such a memory working as a bridge, we are all possible amnesiacs at one point or another.

The ego determines whether or not something is true or a calculation is accurate according to what “makes sense” or “works”. The Unconscious is concerned with Meaning. If a calculation is meaningless, the Unconscious will not lend the ego the necessary affirmation it needs in order to function. All memories of past thoughts become apparently equal, for no inner compulsion can set the one apart from another. A miscalculation becomes impossible, but so does a proper calculation.

 

We are so accustomed the notion of a “right answer” existing for everything that we are almost pathologically (and in some cases actually pathologically) resistant to the idea that a “proper calculation” cannot exist if there is no one in the right mind to complete it. Yet this is, looked at more broadly, irrefutably the case. Being in the “wrong mind” to think something through does not render one mad; it simply means that one’s mind is not in the right place to think of such things. The Unconscious would not allow us to fritter our lives away by obsession with minute and inconsequential matters. It is not so much that it interferes as that it simply wants no part in it.

 

*This is a metaphor.

 

Dm.A.A.