Category: Rant

Second-Hand Knowledge

ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα

Socrates

I often ask myself in this day and age of dis/misinformation about what I truly know and I feel that I can confidently say that if I myself have not experienced a phenomenon first-hand, either as an observer of or as a direct participant of, then I do not truly have knowledge of that phenomenon, rather only a belief of it. And what are beliefs if not a level of certainty in the validity or invalidity of some statement or assertion? The advantage of knowledge is that it allows belief/certainty to be transferred to others without the recipient’s necessity to experience it themselves first-hand, often at a lesser cost than what the propagators of that knowledge paid to gain that knowledge. There is an implicit level of trust involved in this relationship, in that, the knowledge is assumed to have been tested against a reasonable level of scrutiny and that there is no motive in its declaration other than to propagate truth. Even with this trust, we can and should always attempt to retrace the steps the originator traversed to assert the validity of what is stated so that the information the is not merely accepted at face-value. Only then should we accept something as being true or false. I think that we too often accept someone’s credentials as being sufficient to justify what they purport to be true and never go beyond that and it is corrupting all that we know or believe we know. These days, I do my best to state “I do not know” or “I believe that…” rather than state that something is because in the end, all I have are beliefs, some just stronger than others.

Divided, we are falling

The more we are told we are special, the more we believe it to be true and the more we feed our ego, thus the more divided we become. There are people who long ago figured out that if we are divided, then we are in the dark, reaching out for the light switch. They discovered that if you tell those people that you have the light switch, many will believe you, real or not and you can charge them a fee and profit. I see throughout media constant ways in which we are told one group is special or another is special, and divisions are formed as a result. We are truly being manipulated and I believe this is intentional and is limiting us as a species from realizing our potential and purpose. There’s a very powerful idiom that captures this, “United we stand, divided we fall.” It is only through directed focus that we achieve great things, either on our own or as a collective.

One of the main tenets of Buddhism is that in order to find happiness, one must dissolve ego. I wholeheartedly agree with this idea. I see so much unhappiness everywhere and unfailingly I see it attached to ego in some way. Taking only what we need and leaving the rest for others, giving to charity, detaching ourselves from material, useless things that do absolutely nothing to better our souls – these are the things we should keep on the forefront of our minds. You will be told that you deserve more because you work harder or because things that were done to your ancestors by other peoples’ ancestors means you should get more or that how you feel is always normal and you should have the right to feel that way and others must respect it no matter what. This is all food for your ego and buying into it continues to divide us infinitesimally. Lift the veil, perceive what is happening, think your own thoughts, question, attempt to understand and always ask, “who is to profit from all of this?”