"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge" Benjamin Disraeli


I'm taking a stand today people.

Knowledge is a perpetual goal. The carrot on the end of long stick. A driving force.

False knowledge is a dead end. Damaging, limiting and destructive to human evolution.


There's a great bit in the opening of Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Marlowe talks about the map of the African continent as it appeared in his youth. For Marlowe the child, Africa's outline was essentially the sum total of topographical knowledge and this made it quite easy to swallow. This is conceptually akin to that area of uncharted waters which simply read, "There be monsters". This is where imagination lives.

The progression of our knowledge can be charted by the way our ignorance is continually expanding to encompass more and more as time goes on. It reminds me a bit of watching Lost. You've got questions, which upon being answered simply raise more and more questions. As infuriating as this can be, it's healthy.

In an information vacuum, imagination rampantly consumes all available space. It's only natural that a blank canvas leaves plenty of scope to add unfettered form and colour. Complications arise, as Marlowe recognised, when we begin to shade that lacuna with supposed "fact". This is when Darkness takes over those wide open spaces. As George Bernard Shaw expertly put it, “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”

Ignorance breeds curiosity and fuels imagination. An inquisitive mind seeks to understand why, where false knowledge considers the matter closed. People tend to scapegoat ignorance for others backward, bigoted or biased behavior, whereas I would certainly attribute these traits to assimilated, false knowledge.

The most universal method for the transfer of knowledge is writing. Plato's work Phaedrus recounts Socrates' story of the Egyptian king Thamus and Theuth, the inventor of the written word. In this story, Theuth presents his new invention to King Thamus, telling him that it'll "improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians". King Thamus is skeptical, rejecting it as a tool to aid recollection, rather than a means of retaining knowledge. His argument is that the written word will infect the Egyptian people with fake knowledge because they'll get their facts second hand, without experience.

Sorry. Remind anyone of anything? How much of this internet learning do you think really sinks in? Well, any questions, google 'em.