Ignorance is bliss, for a time. Smoking cigarettes used to be seen as candy for adults. With the subsequent lung cancer and nicotine addiction rates sky rocketing up through the 40’s and 50’s, cigarettes were exposed as the cause. From 1964, cigarette use has been in decline, because the illusion can longer be sustained. Those who smoke these days are fully aware that they do it to their own hurt.
The ignorance of an impending risk or danger can protect one from stress and absolve them from responsibility or obligation, but in the end, reality and the harm that comes with it will exact its proper toll. Perpetuated ignorance is little more than a comfort bubble with an ever thinning membrane. A bubble that’s doomed to pop when a looming reality breaks through and the illusion is no longer able to be maintained.
You can pretend there is no intruder in your kitchen to soothe your fears, but when he bursts into the bedroom and attacks, you will have much more pain, fear, and stress than from facing the reality in the first place, when you still had a chance to prevent such a disastrous conclusion.
Benjamin Franklin points out, “Being ignorant isn’t so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” We are all born quite ignorant after all. But as we learn and grow, we come to a point where we learn we don’t have to grow. Biting into this tantalizing fruit solves some problems, but creates larger ones. It’s like exterminating rats on a wooden boat with a shotgun. Sure, you killed them all, but now the boat is slowly sinking.
When we cement ourselves prematurely, the results are you being a man or woman of self-imposed restrictions; less capable, less willing, less spiritually connected, and therefore, less able to make a substantial impact in this life. We all draw our shortsighted lines in the sand, then bemoan the travesty when the tsunami of life comes crashing through our beloved castles on the beach. How poetically pitiful when we start filling our buckets with sand to build them all again.
Willful ignorance may be the true opiate of the masses. It sedates the drive and capacity to know more and change. It is easy to see the conflict of interest. Change is not easy, especially when it involves dismantling our seemingly ingrained constructs of self, others and life. Ignorance is a commonly used mortar cementing the fragile brick huts we build up around ourselves, designed more for self-preservation than as a home base for launching quests into the greater unknown.
And to face the unknown, we must grow. But in order to grow, we must change. In order to change, we must learn. In order to learn, we must place what we know on the burning altar of truth and be prepared to see if it holds its form in the fire or is reduced to ash.
The truth may hurt, deeply and thoroughly, but the price is the cure of a malady; ignorance, disorder, and the indwelt patterns that cause us to put ourselves and others through great pain. We must aggressively ponder and wrestle through the deeper existential questions that don’t come with easy answers.
When we pave over these child-like inquiries, we begin to blow the bubble. All bubbles we make are destined to pop, and should be popped. Preferably we should address our own bubbles with critical and courageous thought. Otherwise reality will eventually have to do the popping. In any case, we must not forgo the medicine for fear of the needle.