I know one thing and that is I know nothing

A lesson in Socratic humility.

After another lap around the sun – and the Greeks did worship the sun – I thought, in the Socratic spirit, I would open up about what I wrestle with knowing and not knowing, my struggles with modernity, and a few (thousand haha) things I just don’t understand.

I’ve always prided myself on being a well-read and worldly human being, continuing to further my education and utilising my intelligence in pursuing a life of virtue – the philosophical life. However, even this has not prepared me for the total onslaught on mind and morality, particularly over the last decade, that has left me questioning so much and feeling like I know so little.

Public life hasn't changed much in 2400 years, always "apologising" for something - Photo by Martyn Foster 

“It seems like a day doesn’t go by where the sky is not blue, but proclaimed purple, or that the bench with wet paint is actually perfectly okay to sit on.”

It’s mentally exhausting to say the least trying to keep up with what’s now supposedly true – I largely believe this is by design to deliberate fatigue and overwhelm our powers of cognition to makes us easier to control, manipulate, and be compliant. You have the other side of the coin in which it is to enrage us into a bunch of orchestrated group battles, occupying us but achieving little.

This is not meant to be a rant about what I don’t like about the world, so I hope it doesn’t read as such. I have the humility and awareness to understand there will forever be more of what I don’t know than what I do know, and even what I do know is up for conjecture. However, I feel we are seeing the proliferation of genuinely bad ideas under some false sense of liberation. Freeing yourself from established knowledge and wisdom will surer lead you to ignorance and delusion than revelation.

As I wrote about last week, to control what you can control, and how we have a desire to go beyond that, I believe that flows into what we know and don’t know. What we know provides us with a foundational base with which we live and act in the world, so, it stands to be that we would naturally try and control what we know otherwise our world would crumble. I think this is partially why we’ve seen a rise in people who are such stringent adherents to a particular ideology with a blind refusal to accept any different view or new information that runs contrary to their belief.

“Genuine acceptance never comes from force and demands. It is a voluntary act of love, respect, and tolerance.”

For a society that claims in wants to “feel all the feels”, there is a severe lack of sincere feeling. The sheer amount of cynicism, mocking, and turning everything into a joke or meme completely annihilates any form of genuine emotion and buries even the thought of demonstrating it. The level of manipulation and deceit particularly paraded through the media and online has me second guessing what is real or manufactured, shifting my default response towards calling bullshit and feelings of apathy. I feel like I’m permanently trying to be conned out of my attention, emotions, and money. The fake cloud is overshadowing the genuine cry for help – for which I see two main responses: a withdrawal of care (risk aversion) or belief that everyone are truth-tellers (naïve acceptance). The rise of what I refer to as language “cults”, largely full of newly invented or obscure terminology and used primarily as a weapon, inhibits real discourse and genuine communication and understanding.

This whole “Men vs Women” thing I find particularly worrisome given both its overt and more sinister natures. I really wish it would stop, and we could remember that we’re meant to compliment, not replace, one another. Largely what I see is incredibly ineffective, and at worst, damaging, both in the short-term and long to the relationships between the two. By the day, men and women seem to be growing more and more insufferable to one another, the communication is breaking down, and the desire to truly understand the other is less and less. Problem is, we’re instilling this into the next generation of boys and girls to inherently distrust the other, amongst other things sometimes very pernicious things, which is a recipe for disaster and a lot of unfulfilling relationships.  

Despite my degree in psychology and counselling, I don’t understand why – and I’ve always been very hesitant to say anything on the topic – the whole “pride and pronouns” thing has become so prominent. History has taught us that during late-stage civilisations before collapse or destruction this type of behaviour (intense fascination with identity and sexuality) tends to increase, and I suppose looking around at the current fate of the world I shouldn’t be surprised. I posit it could be because it’s one of the few things we truly have some control over, that, and if life is a foregone conclusion, people tend to choose hedonic pleasure seeking before making their way out. It could also be a result of the internet world seeping back into the real world. Of course, I don’t really know, and I could be wildly off base. It’s more the behaviour around this topic that I find bizarre than the topic itself.

I’ve always been concerned with knowledge and knowing. Not knowing has never sat well with me. I’ve historically viewed it as a sign of a lack of education or intelligence, or that my research wasn’t thorough or good enough. I’ve never liked being the one with the weaker argument – which has been one of my goals with this whole venture, to help people make stronger arguments – I would find it humiliating and that it reflects poorly on me. However, trying to win all the arguments and solve all the problems is exhausting, and with time, or perhaps just being worn down, I’ve become wise(r) like Socrates in knowing that I don’t know – a paradoxical statement. It’s worth mentioning that the historical context is paramount when fully examining this Socratic notion, but for today we won’t go further. There are less things that I am certain of, more things that I am doubtful. The hills that I would die on have dramatically reduced and I have more questions than answers. With great men like Sir David Attenborough, turning 100 today and with whom I share a birthday with, there will be things of the natural world beyond even his comprehension and yet he has stayed humble and inquisitive, and more importantly, has been of great service to humanity. An example for us all.  

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