You’re soooooo ignorant

I was sitting in a car today watching the back of a truck up ahead. The sun and the surrounding objects were creating a shadow movie on the truck, it was kind of fascinating. I’m sure the guy inside had no idea about what was going on back there. That’s humbling. The world is very different now from what it used to be, even ten years ago. Suddenly, information is readily available whenever we want it – just jump onto the super-highway. Have you been to wikipedia? I’m sure you’ve come across it in your google searches. It’s an amazing tool – a humongous and ever-growing online encyclopedia. But. Despite our constantly growing knowledge and the increasing ease of access to it, we are limited. We can only know so much. Some man in some truck this morning knows driving routes between tons of different locations in this area but he doesn’t know what the back of his own truck looks like when he drives across a bridge on a sunny day. He probably doesn’t even really know what the back of his head looks like.

This is a large universe we live in, and at any given instant, there is a whole universe of information to take in. A slight shift in perspective and a completely different subset of that universe is available to our senses. Proximacy and relevancy mean nothing – few things can be closer and more relevant to me than the back of my own head, but I am in one the worst possible positions to observe it, yet I can give a pretty detailed account of the life of a hippopotamus on the other side of the world.

Socrates taught that the wisest thing a man can do is admit his ignorance. I’m seeing that idea in a whole different light right now. If you don’t admit you’re ignorance, you’re not acknowledging the majority of existence. That would make any person who didn’t admit his ignorance infinitely ignorant. Damn.