The Path To True Wisdom

This is going to sound incredibly corny but I'm going to quote Weird Al Yankovic for the philosophy that will lead you to wisdom. Maybe you won't become an enlightened spiritual leader of billions but you will become an informed responsible member of society and a example for all humanity.

Everything you know is wrong,
Black is white, up is down and short is long,
And everything you thought was just so important doesn't matter.
Everything you know is wrong,
Just forget the words and sing along,
All you need to understand is everything you know is wrong.

Because of the method of delivery it sounds much sillier than it actually is. In fact, it isn't silly at all, it is the ultimate wisdom! Nothing, not even knowledge is absolute. Much of it is misinformation, or worse, disinformation! Even the most widely accepted facts may be based on pure fiction or downright lies. Even science is subject to new theories that model the truth better than the old, accepted knowledge. So, since any specific piece of knowledge may be completely false, and even the strongest pieces of knowledge may be proven wrong at some point in the future it only makes sense to accept that everything you know is, at least to some degree, wrong.

This is how young children learn. They have an inherent understanding that there is far more that they don't know then there is that they do know. This makes the knowledge that they currently hold highly subject to change or reinterpretation. This is how all furry four-legged animals start off being labeled as "doggy", then later get broken off into "doggy" and "kitty", and eventually come to have separate categories for hundreds of different animals from mice to elephants.

Somewhere along the line, we lose this propensity to reinterpret what we know. We 'grow up' and become preoccupied with 'being right' rather than 'getting it right'. By the time we are teenagers we place the feeling of independence above even safety and thus tend to want to reject anything that disagrees with our current view of the world. The fact that we have been exposed to virtually nothing by this point in our lives and the fact that our brains aren't even capable of handling many more complex ideas don't hinder our blatant manifestations of pride and disrespect.

It is during this brief period of transition where our knowledge is still somewhat mutable, but is becoming more and more resistant that we begin to 'create' terribly ignorant 'knowledge'. This is the process that teaches us to separate "person" into multiple categories like "black" and "white" or "Christian" and "Muslim", when the differences are far less significant than the similarities. It also pushes us to make patently false associations like coupling "poor" (or "fat") with "lazy", "rich" (or "religious") with "righteous", or "pretty" with "good" (and thus "ugly" with "evil").

If you keep in mind the fact that everything you know is wrong every time you are presented with information you will have done what most people never do -- conquer ignorance. A great many advances in science have been delayed by scientists being bogged down by what they were taught instead of exploring interesting independent ideas, philosophies or ways of thinking they had that are not consistent with their teachings. If the people noted for great accomplishments in history acted like the vast majority of humanity, the ones that don't appear in the history books, we would still be in the stone age. We would still think the sun and stars revolve around the Earth. We would think that the world is flat, and that it is possible to sail off the edge of the Earth. We would never has learned Einstein's Theory of Relativity and thus all nuclear power and nuclear medicine wouldn't exist. Virtually all societies would be ruled by autocrats, be they tribal elders, hereditary kings or vicious warlords.

You will avoid the pitfall of ignoring both empirical evidence and the truth sitting right in front of your nose just to protect the false and worthless comfort of 'being right'. Every single piece of human experience is influenced heavily by every experience that happened earlier. You'll have defeated the all-powerful preconceived notion. You will become immune to propaganda, and with a little luck, immune to hate. Continuous learning is one of the greatest virtues known to man. Learning, the ultimate utilization of God's greatest gift to man -- his brain -- is the best way to glorify God. When we allow what we think we know to make us resistant to knowledge we have turned from God and begun to do the Devil's work. If you accept this truth than it becomes fairly obvious that most of the world's religions have fallen from grace and have long since begun to do the Devil's work.

The worst that can happen if you are willing to consider a new truth is that you will discover it too to be wrong, in which case you can just continue on with what you originally believed. "No harm, no foul" meets "nothing ventured, nothing gained". At best, we can cast doubt on what we believed and become more open to greater, more universal truths. Maybe, by the time we pass from this world we might actually know something worthwhile, or better yet, have contributed something while we were still here.

It is most unfortunate that the people who most flatly refuse this philosophy tend to seek and somehow be given leadership positions. This is tantamount to the blind leading the blind. Actually, it is more like the profoundly blind leading the barely-able-to-see 'legally' blind. But, we only have ourselves to blame for their rise to power. By and large, we put them in those positions, which begs the question, "does that make us more blind than they are?" Even when men force their way into leadership so they may foist their personal choice of blindness upon others we can still blame ourselves for having let them. There are always ways to stop this from happening though they do tend to involve great personal risk, so naturally we make every excuse possible to avoid doing it, and then blame others for having let it happen.

This particular kind of blindness is called "ideology" and it is the worst kind of knowledge. It is particularly bound to the belief that what you currently know is the only and absolute truth and what you value is critically important while nothing else is even remotely important. And thus economy rules over ecology (or biology if you prefer). It's best to ignore Climate Change (AKA Global Warming) because it is inconvenient and doing anything at all about it would be disruptive to the economy. To that I say, "That is entirely theoretical -- it might be true that embracing new technology and new lifestyles may end up enhancing the economy. After all, if you haven't noticed, what we're doing right now isn't exactly doing so well!" Also, to that I ask, "how much money do you make after you are dead?"

Ideology is frequently based on no facts whatsoever and is therefore virtually immune to influence from actual truth or even direct evidence to the contrary. Ideology is more about emotion than fact. It is more about personal identity than fact. The world is becoming increasingly ruled by, and even obsessed with, ideology. The only way to combat this is to enter every situation with the basic understanding that everything you know is wrong!