Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. ― Aldous Huxley

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. ― Anatole France

 

The title words can bring down an individual or a nation. Both are well-ingrained into our collective consciousness, and both are well on their way to destroying America. But there is a glimmer hope: It isn’t too late to stop both tyrants in their tracks and to repair the damage. It will take a lot of effort.

 

Let’s begin by defining our key terms. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, generally or specifically. You can see it in anyone who cannot count past 1,000, or cannot name every state, or who cannot identify 80 percent of all the countries in the world. His/her reading skills are so weak  he cannot grasp the plot, or analyze the situation, or assimilate it into his own experiences and thus broaden his knowledge base and his horizons.   More likely than not, he also is undisciplined in his personal life, looks upon study as a waste of time, and those who commit themselves to learning as weaklings. He is wrong on all counts. And that leads us to arrogance.

 

An arrogant person doesn’t know that he doesn’t know, yet goes about life as if he really knows it all. Once again, let’s get specific. I will use examples that arise from politics, but only because they are so obvious, yet they are also relevant. During the recent Presidential campaign, Mitt Romney referred to the bottom 47 percent of Americans (the poor) as people who feel “entitled” to free things, and as “victims” of society. He said they wouldn’t vote for him, so he would just write them off. After the election, both Romney and political commentator, Bill O’Reilly, said that those who voted for Obama were people who “wanted stuff.” Both remained ill-informed even after the results of the election should have given them reasons to reflect deeper into their own beliefs. The data from polling experts showed an entirely different set of factors behind who voted for each candidate and why.

 

Romney and O’Reilly are both relatively intelligent and well-educated people. And so are most others that hold their world view about those issues that divide and stratify us.  And both are relatively wealthy in terms of owning “things.” Perhaps they are also obsessed by their wealth and have a great fear of losing it.  But this much is certain: There is no cause/effect linkage between wealth and intelligence. A poor person is just as likely to be very intelligent as a rich person; and a rich person is just as likely to be stupid as a poor person.

 

 Ohio State University researcher Jay Zagorsky tracked 7,400 participants on their wealth accumulations over a period of 25 years. He compared “before” and “after” wealth profiles and compared them to the participants’ IQ scores. He found that there was no relationship at all between the two variables. None. [i]

 

Would this knowledge have helped in how Romney conducted his campaign?

 

The post-election analysis showed that Romney lost among women, blacks, Hispanics, the poor, the young, and older voters. He won among the wealthy, in the South and Central West, and among white males. Did the first group all want stuff? Or, did Romney insult the intelligence of too many people and too many groups?

 

Wisdom starts by analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating facts and data, and by drawing sound conclusions from that investigation. In contrast, arrogance persists by relying on a mental process that psychologists call “dissonance reduction.”

 

Cognitive dissonance occurs when we make a decision, and the facts later prove that our decision was wrong. Put another way, we have a need to resolve our mental state of confusion. The easy way out is to ignore the truth and to merely assert that we were right all along, and the world is wrong. We then draw from our beliefs—not from facts—to find “the truth.” Romney’s campaign managers concluded they should have “doubled down” on their spending, and hit the theme even harder that “stuff” seekers were the problem.   By any other term, this is arrogance at its worst. The person who persists in holding onto false beliefs, without questioning them, and without making adjustments based on reality, is a continual problem to him/herself, and to society.

 

Concluding. The solution to both ignorance and to arrogance is the same: education. Not education as usual, but education that forces you to think. It has very little to do with memorizing a lot of facts. It has a lot to do with taking a lot facts and showing that you understand them, and you can use them in many different situations; it gives you the tools for analyzing them by breaking them down into their component parts and showing how they all inter-related or not; and then extending your new knowledge by linking it to other facts and processes that you have learned; and then by going even further by assessing all your facts, processes, and conclusions in developing a new world view.   Do all these steps over and over again, learn from them, and build onto your reservoir of knowledge.   Sooner or later you will become a fully-functioning individual capable of observing, listening, and drawing honest conclusions about life, your place in it, and how to get more out of it.   There are no guarantees in life, but, more likely than not—and sooner than you may believe—you will be a lot more valuable to yourself and to others. It’s worth a try.  We all need it, our country needs it, and so does humanity.

 

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