The Bliss of Ignorance?

I was watching Steve Kroft interviewing Julian Assange (Founder of WikiLeaks) on CBS 60 Minutes the other Sunday. Something about the interview got me wondering about the Bliss of Ignorance. The question that arose in me during the interview was - Do we want to hear or know everything that our leaders or governments do in the name of us - the People? Surprisingly I had no definitive YES or NO answer to this question -just a MAYBE - it depends! Well that’s not good enough, I told myself. I do not appreciate living in the grey zone.  While I was pondering over this, I had an epiphany of sorts– A lot of people “prefer” to live in ignorance not because they can’t help it, but rather that they prefer to live in ignorance bliss because it absolves them of the responsibility to have to do something about it once they know the truth – especially if the truth leads to the responsibility of having to act against the status quo! Once you gain knowledge about something then you are now voluntarily or involuntarily recruited into being responsible for it.

 With responsibility comes action and with action comes accountability. Thus you consciously or unconsciously become an ‘activist’ or a ‘revolutionary’ of sorts. The essence of learning is that once one becomes informed, the information and knowledge inevitably leads to consciousness – e.g. self-consciousness or, social-consciousness or what I like to call  ‘circumstantial relative-consciousness’ i.e. when you understand yourself clearly relative to the circumstance of your universe. As Steve Biko once said, change the way a person thinks and you change their behavior!

Thus, I truly believe that when we say Ignorance is Bliss, it’s a choice because  the quest to be accepted, to be included, to belong is always greater than the pressure to maintain one’s own collective identity and thus one’s perceive integrity in the face of contradictory knowledge or values. Hence, when all I could come up with was a “maybe” to my question I was choosing to be in the bliss of ignorance? This hedging on my part, I concluded, was based on my double standard that -I don’t like secret, unless they are mine! However I have since come up with a definitive position on this thought, which I choose to keep a secret! But on a more general level my learning curve and final conclusion is that those who prefer or choose the bliss of ignorance are choosing to be irresponsible, hence those who stand for nothing account for nothing! Therefore, it’s better to be wrong than to be nothing.

Copyright @ January 31, 2011 by Dr. Tendai Ndoro begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting  end_of_the_skype_highl(DocNdoro) – Founder, SLIPPA/Brighten The Corner Foundation; CEO- EDCTrainers, LLC.