By Alex P. Vidal
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”— Martin Luther King, Jr.
THE saddest part of being alive is to be ignorant, or remain ignorant for the rest of our life. Never mind poverty. With luck, a good health, determination and hard work, we can overcome it.
A wise man—a Filipino politician, I think—once quipped, “I fear poverty more than death.” For some people, including the Filipino politician, poverty means “hell on earth”; affluence or richness is “heaven on earth.”
But there is more worrisome or niggling in life than poverty: ignorance.
According to Socrates, who was possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy, “ignorance is the only evil.”
He was probably correct. Nowadays if we are ignorant, technology can destroy us; social media can bring us serious anxiety and ruin our life.
Fake news will swallow us whole. Tiktok and other dizzying and devious online apps will altogether mutilate our rational and moral judgment.
If we are ignorant, we mistake the villain for an important character; we falsely idolize demagogues and elect them into important government positions.
Instead of rejecting violence and denouncing terrorism—political and otherwise—we outwardly tolerate and even endorse them. “Suspected criminals and drug addicts deserve to be executed”; “the governor or mayor deserved to die for engaging in illegal drug trafficking,” etcetera.
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If we are ignorant, we can be easily tantalized and duped by false demigods and religious impostors. “I was chosen by God to be your leader”; “I talked to God and the charges of rape, exploitation, human
trafficking, corruption leveled against me are the works of the devil”; etcetera.
If we are ignorant, we swallow hook, line, and sinker the claims of insincere politicians that we need to change or repair our constitution to give us a better life economically and politically without thinking they were cooking something to serve their own whims and caprices, including the perpetuation of political dynasty.
If we are ignorant, we can be easily coaxed to invest our hard-earned money in pyramid and Ponzi-like investment scams.
Thank you Socrates (470 B.C.-399 B.C) for exposing our frailties and imperfections when civilization was in the infant stage.
The Greek philosopher, who walked on this earth some 500 years before Christ was born, never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic nature of his death.
Socrates thought that a philosopher is someone who recognizes that there is a lot he does not understand, and is troubled by it.
In that sense, he was still wiser than all those who bragged about their knowledge of things they really knew nothing about.
Socrates himself said, “One thing only I know and that is that I know nothing.”
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But while Socrates constantly questioned the extent of his own knowledge (a method that Rene Descartes was to employ some 2,000 years later), Socrates believed that it is possible for man to obtain absolute truths about the Universe.
He felt that it was necessary to establish a solid foundation for our knowledge, a foundation which he believed lay in man’s reason. With his unshakable faith in human reason, Socrates was decidedly a rationalist.
In the year 399 B.C., Socrates was accused of “introducing new gods (the “divine inner voices” he claimed to hear in his head) and corrupting youth, as well as not believing in the accepted gods.
Although the government of Athens was one of the world’s earliest democracies, Socrates, on the other hand, let everyone know he believed it was better for the state to be ruled by a single person, whom he described as “the one who knows.”
Some regarded Socrates’ outspoken views as a threat to the very fabric of Athenean life.
Worried by his anti-democratic influence over the many young aristocrats (including Plato) involved in the Socratic think-tank, a jury of 501 found him guilty by a slender majority and was forced to drink the poison hemlock.
(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo.—Ed)
