True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge,
but the refusal to acquire it.
but the refusal to acquire it.
— Karl Popper
I rarely encounter a fatuous opinion that's based on knowledge.
They're almost always based on bullshit.
Knowledge has never been as easy to acquire than it is today.
And yet ignorance remains rampant.
We let it go unchecked.
People who are ignorant counter knowledge by labeling it opinion, as if there were no difference.
"Well, that's your opinion."
But there's a vast difference, which has been understood for 2,500 years.
The Ancient Greek philosophers called opinion doxa; knowledge, episteme.
Episteme, the philosophers taught, had privilege over doxa because it was rational (or what we'd call "evidence-based").
To label episteme as doxa—to say, "Well, that's your opinion"—is to conflate the two forms of knowledge.
In short, to pile ignorance on top of ignorance.
But some ignorant people want to double down even on that.
When cornered by unwanted evidence, they label it fake news, as Trump labeled Covid-19 in October 2020—despite the detection of 69,000 new cases every day.
Insisting there's fake news is worse than ignorant; it's psychotic.
It's the cranial condition Karl Popper described as "true ignorance."
Ignorance that won't seek self-help.
Millions of our citizens share this psychosis—incurably, I'm afraid.
But that's nothing new.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been," science writer Isaac Asimov said in 1980.
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence," Mark Twain said in 1887, "and then success is sure."
