Is ignorance bliss?

With knowledge and experience, human beings encounter both the light and the dark side of everything human.

Knowledge and experience can help to reduce our fear as we see the reality of things, but it can also make us more fearful as we witness what a human being is capable of. This always works both ways. 

The more we see what a human being is capable of, and even exposed to it, the more the color of our paintings of the world turn from pink to black. The pinker our painting, the more naive and optimistic we are; and the blacker it is, the more experienced and pessimistic we become. At this stage, views on human nature are divided into two: man is intrinsically good and there is always hope; and man is intrinsically bad and humanity is doomed to extinction.

In this world, unless we live on a mountain top or isolated from people, there is no escape from knowledge and experience. Indeed, this is not the purpose anyway. The purpose is to understand what we do with the knowledge and experience we gain, and thus to deepen our understanding of life and human nature by moving away from its bipolar horizontal axis.

Knowledge and experience automatically give people responsibility. What is decisive is not the knowledge itself, but what we do with it.

Many people think that ignorance can be fought off by knowledge alone, whereas with knowledge we can very well remain ignorant. Just as true freedom is not about satisfying the ego unhindered and fulfilling its need for pleasure, so too the way out of ignorance is not through an abundance of knowledge.

If we are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses due to lack of knowledge and experience, such happiness, which is in danger of collapsing at any moment, is of course of no value. The darkness that we face with knowledge and experience inevitably leads us to unhappiness at first, but as we make the most of the responsibility that comes with it, that unhappiness gives way to wisdom, joy and inner peace that has no opposite. Therefore, the real cause of our unhappiness is not knowledge and experience per se, but our inability to handle the responsibility that knowledge and experience impose on us. Unhappiness is not a direct sign of knowledge and intelligence, nor is happiness a sign of ignorance.

At the center is the human being, not knowledge. What matters is, what one uses this knowledge for. One can use knowledge to destroy or control others; one can also use it to make human life easier and to provide practical solutions. One can use knowledge to gain power by convincing oneself and others of one’s own superiority; one can also use it for the common good of all, without any concern for superiority.

Using knowledge in the right way is independent of any horizontal scale – age, knowledge and experience – and is related to how emotionally mature a person is and how much they are able to transcend the mind by engaging Reason. Therefore, we need to question our habit of exalting some people as “intellectuals” just because they are relatively knowledgeable and educated, or of labeling others as “ignorant” just because they are relatively uninformed and uneducated.

With the so-called “age of enlightenment”, knowledge and the power of the mind have become central to our lives. While this is an essential and natural stage in the development of humanity, to think that this is the end point is a fallacy with devastating effects.

As long as we glorify the power of the mind alone, we will continue to value knowledge itself rather than what it is used for. But mental capacity and knowledge alone do not bring enlightenment. Enlightenment is characterized by the pursuit of the common good rather than one’s own interests or those of one’s own group, and by the consciousness of rising together rather than the desire for power through ruthless domination over others. 

Let Reason always be our mind’s guide.