Ignorant vs Stupid
First things first, let’s just define a few words for the sake of clarity.
According to Merriam-Webster:
Ignorance is simply a lack of knowledge, education or awareness.
To be ignorant is to lack knowledge or comprehension of a specified thing.
Comprehension is the capacity for understanding something fully.
Stupid is to be slow of mind, or to lack intelligence or reason.
To be considered ignorant about a given subject, let’s say politics, shouldn’t be something that one takes personal offense to. Our ability to honestly recognize our level of understanding about a subject helps make us efficient. For example, we hire an electrician if we’re ignorant about the complexities of electrical systems in order to keep our home from being destroyed and our family from being killed in a fire. We admit to ourselves, in not so certain terms, that we are ignorant about electrical work.
For a slew of reasons, far too many people are unwilling or unable to recognize their lack of knowledge about anything relating to politics. This includes, but is not limited to:
Economics
Socioeconomics
Government functionality
Policy making
Media literacy
Climate science
Foreign policy
The justice system
American and world history
Racial inequalities
Functions of democracy, including the voting process
Private vs public sector responsibilities
And the list goes on and on
I’m here to argue that we can spread peace and happiness by improving our collective relationship with self awareness and the truth about our individual levels of knowledge that we truly possess about a given subject.
For example, we’d find ourselves in less confrontations that are driven by emotions and opinions disguised by our ignorance as logical and common sense, resulting in less metaphorical fires burning down our houses. This would also provide some more clarity as to who we should trust as experts with our interests in mind and who’s only saying what we want to hear as a con for profit.
Do you know when to call a licensed and bonded electrician versus your friend who knows a bit about electrical work? Do you know how to recognize an electrical expert versus an opportunist who’s convinced you that they’ve got your best interest in mind, yet they’re only there to turn a profit while providing nothing of true value in return, and putting your home, your family and you at risk? Do you know how to recognize a news outlet or internet pundit that’s doing real journalism, trying to keep the public informed and strengthen our democratic processes versus an opportunistic organization or individual who’s concerned about ratings, profits and self gains all at the expense of the health of your psychological and social health.
Certainty and Confidence: Products Of and By News Media
It could be argued that the most valuable thing that a media outlet can deliver to you is confidence. Valuable in terms of the potentially important information that a consumer can be confidently prepared with in order to make crucial decisions for their own life, such as eating habits or family emergency protocols, and for their contributions to bigger picture issues like their role in democracy or their environmental footprint. However, there’s also an incredible monetary value for the media outlets themselves because if you or I, as consumers, trust a particular outlet enough, we’ll likely return for more, which can increase their market value. But here also lies the problem. When delivering confidence to consumers has a profit motive, this can, and often does pose a conflict of interest with how some outlets handle their responsibilities as the custodians of the democratic process.
We have a cable news and talk radio industry that’s driven by cynical punditry and delivering extreme and divisive views that are delivered with a tone of absolute certainty, with no room in their segments for critical thought or the consideration of alternative viewpoints. This has only grown exponentially by bloggers, vloggers, podcasters and other influencers that deliver a set of thoughts and talking points to their audience that, in combination with a release of mood enhancing chemicals in our brains like endorphins, can empower us with a level of certainty that’s not supported by the appropriate level of knowledge. So basically, their followers are not as smart as they think they are by simply listening to these pundits and repeating their talking points. This happens primarily with regards to politics and politically related issues.
This is not by accident, nor is it a byproduct. This is a deliberate and built in mechanism by many of the most popular news outlets. Whether it’s the snarky dumbfaces of Tucker Carlson, the condescending chuckles of Rachel Maddow, the predictable redundancy they follow along manufactured partisan lines like Sean Hannity, or the boisterous hate being screamed by the recently deceased Rush Limbaugh who was a spreader of rhetorical poison, and all of the opportunistic wannabes that have ridden the coat tails of this morally bankrupt business model, their job is to keep us tuning in. And they know they can do that if they appear confident and if they can make their audience feel certain in themselves. There’s real power in the ability to control the mood, mind and morals of an audience.
The Dunning Kruger Effect on News Consumer
The Dunning Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where people with low levels of knowledge about a given subject are overly confident in their knowledge about that subject because they don’t know enough to know how much they don’t know. To put it briefly, they’re too ignorant to know how ignorant they are.
This cognitive bias is something that many media outlets and pundits use to manipulate people with a strategic aim at specific demographics such as age, religion, race, economic position, political ideology and education level. Part of this aim is to direct specific messaging designed to invoke a response desired by the media outlet to ensure the greatest profit. The most desired and easily invoked responses tend to be emotional in nature.
Emotional responses can be generated through dramatic and divisive “infotainment”, which is entertainment disguised as information, and emotional responses tend to be easier to inspire in people with lower levels of knowledge about a given subject.
So, people who consume a daily diet of toxic and opportunistic pundits, are not being guided toward a greater level of knowledge and understanding by people with the viewers best interest in mind. They’re being driven by a company with a profit motive to keeping you glued to the screen, day after day. This is done with the same business model that keeps consumers tuned in to celebrity gossip, reality TV, murder mysteries, sports programming, etc. It’s the drama of what will happen next. The drama of the enemy vs the heroes. Except the enemies depicted in many of these programs are your fellow Americans, innocent citizens of the world, scientific experts and whoever else a given outlet deems worthy of dramatic content that day in order to keep viewers tuning in. This, often times, is all at the expense of the viewers’ mental health and personal relationships.
The irony to all of this is that this infotainment doesn’t provide a lot in the form of knowledge, especially compared to the level of confidence that it delivers to its consumers. An unwarranted level of confidence. Often times, the level of confidence that a person has is greater with a cable news or talk radio “education” than it will ever be even if they spend 10 years in formal education and 30 years working in a given field. This is because once a person starts to learn about a subject, I mean truly learn, they tend to begin to realize how big the subject is and how much they really don’t know, and it helps instill a sense of humility in them. Humility that’s been developed through a better understanding of the subject matter helps provide clarity on that subject. A clarity that will never come from the most common ways that people tend to get their political news.
Accepting One’s Own Ignorance
The point in this post is that I truly and strongly believe that an important factor in the level of peace and civility that a society has is directly tied to, among other things, the relationship that its citizens have with their own personal levels of knowledge. It’s citizens’ ability to recognize their own shortcomings versus being driven by the pride that they hold on to that is directly correlated to their off-balanced level of certainty.
Sam Harris wrote in The End of Faith that “Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one,” and while I believe this quote to be true, I think it extends farther out into almost every part of our society. When a person is so absolutely certain that a Bernie Sanders supporter is equivalent to the leader of Venezuela, or that every republican is a fascist, or that anyone who eats meat is equivalent to a serial killer, or that all cops are bastards, or that Antifa and Black Lives Matter started the fires on the west coast this past summer, or, in the case of Harris’ quote, if you truly believe that someone who doesn’t believe your version of an ancient book is going to suffer the wrath of God by burning in hell for eternity, and that your version of divinity puts you on a higher status with the being that you believe created everything, there is a level of pride and certainty that will never allow for you to take your guard down with people who are in the “other” group in a way that is necessary for us to learn and grow from each other.
When news outlets manufacture enemies in order to keep your attention so that they can collect advertising dollars based on the viewership they can collect within the lowest common denominator of knowledge possessed by those viewers, they have succeeded in their ratings and financial goals, but they have done you and all of us a great disservice.
So, my message to you, and my call to action is to honestly assess your own relationship with your level of knowledge. Humble yourself and come to terms with the fact that you likely don’t know as much as you think you do about everything. Be okay with not having an answer to everything and find comfort and peace in being able to say, “I don’t know,” because this is where real learning begins. There’s peace in not knowing.