"They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for
victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary
opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate
of patience."
- Giordano Bruno
The world is a funny thing and life is an interesting condition if we approach
it as such, but yet nuances and irritations makes part of life as much as
bliss, love and joy – and if we try to take life a little bit less serious than
what we tend to do we will also see that what we deem positive have an increase.
Because life is deadly serious, and because of this we should try to relax and
not take the journey that serious, but rather as explorers and adventurers, heroines
and heroes making a journey someone will remember.
Still, everyone is someone’s asshole, and we all complain about
complainers, trolls and idiots. Sometimes it is like to being a nitwit appears
to be the crown of human accomplishment and thus the more of an idiot you are
the more human you are. And speaking of
idiots, both in linguistic succession and meaning it hails upon the ignorant –
and what is an Ignotus? A person
lacking skill, understanding and perceptions or more detailed someone who is
ignoring what is and thus mistake, misperceive and don’t pay attention to what
is.
This is why debating and discussing with idiots never lead anywhere, because
they simply don’t pay attention to what is discussed about, rather it is about
being victorious in the situation. Whenever we see such shadow forms taking
shape on the walls of the tavern, it is better to realize what is going on than
insist on dialogue or discourse, because it is never going to happen… And of
course the one pointing fingers and call the other an idiot is full of himself
or of hubris or whatever, but the truth is, that we are all idiots in given
fields and situations, no matter how clever we might thing ourselves to be or
be perceives as.
Any idiot would naturally defy such conclusion, but let us leave this aside
for now and move on further into the vein of ignorance, namely to opinion. An
opinion is a judgment. It is a particular form of judgment because it rests
upon what is probable and what we know.
And certainly the more you know the more you will also know that you don’t
know much, because each new landscape opens for another one in a hermeneutic
drama where we are left breathless confronted with the annihilation of what we
don’t know. But those we call idiots don’t feel or see things in this way – and
this being said there is a difference between moments of idiocy and perpetually
being an idiot – and the difference in this lies in how solid you perceive your
opinion to be…
…this because when we lose sight of our communality and what happens
when we meet and instead insist on convincing the one trying to convince is
always left as the idiot, but for some reason idiots never realizes this and
push for victory in the debate or discourse.
We all had these encounters and we leave the battlefield of opinions
wondering what the f$%#@ happened – and the answer is cognitive bias in how we
assess and understand our self. And in this particularly the psychological
effect known as Dunning-Kruger effect, which is named so because of two Cornell
University professors who set out to discover why people who know less always
presenting themselves as knowing more. Hence they were measuring skill in
relation to competence and incompetence. Wikipedia gives a good summary of
their findings which are:
Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people
will
fail to recognize their own lack of skill
fail to recognize genuine skill in others
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are
exposed to training for that skill
The conclusion they gave was that the less competent you are the more
credit you give yourself, while the opposite were true for those possessing
actual skills, they tended to devaluate their achievement. So, back to opinion,
the stronger your opinion is the more reason you have to invite in other perspectives
– and if possible to make a true self-assessment, which is simply measuring
skill in relation to task, talk, experience and knowledge.
But apparently the less you know the louder you speak; the more ignorant
you are the more irrevocable is your opinions. And I must add to this that if
this is in check the more extreme will be your conclusions. And conclusions
made from a sense of victory and convictions will always breed tyranny,
inferiority and lizards of the brain.
As Bruno observed such people are not interested in truth, which I would
interpret as wisdom in this context, but rather they seek appearance and the
illusion of victory. And honestly, victory is not to tear down the chessboard
seeing that you are losing, but making the check mate. In other words it is a
matter of skill and admitting to possessing or lacking this skill that
generates understanding. To say that you have what you don’t have is idiocy –
or ignorance perhaps – yet at the root of much of our nuances and irritations
we find this simple cognitive bias. And knowing this or not we still challenge
the Ignotus, to what ends?
So, this being established allows me to take this cognitive drama out to
the world and to the realm of spiritual seekers, occultists and what not, because
this world is not free from simple psychological mechanisms moving our actions
and opinions. We are still humans, no matter the opinion of our stature, it be
sage or idiot as perceived or given. And let us also keep in mind that any
learned person can be an idiot at heart as any person learned by heart can be
irrational and confusing.
If you have followed me this far I will say that any discussion or
discourse, any writ or social interaction that aims towards victory is wrong.
You might ask, why is it wrong when I know it is right – or even more boisterous,
the truth?
We can speak and debate this matter for pages upon pages, and we will do
so for the weeks to come, so let us just leave it to Giordano Bruno to summarize
for now:
"Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God:
for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a
greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise
yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe
that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of
understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being.
Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw
into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and
moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky,
that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond
death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places,
substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God."