Some very bright person suggested, (to paraphrase), ‘knowing what you don’t know is equally if not more important than knowing what you think you do.’ This, of course, is in direct contrast to the idiot who coined, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you.” We have ceded responsibility to deal with all that we don’t know by assuming that someone else must and that they, therefore, are covering our asses. In fact, there’s just too much to know, and any covering, of any body part, is more than likely accidental and temporary at best.
Substance, (being some linguistic root of substantiation), has been replaced, (there must have been a time when truth and fact was important), by sloganeering. In most places you can ‘have it your way’ while you ‘just do it’, ‘bring good things to light’ and rest assured that ‘Chevy runs deep’. Of course, having it your way is akin to the old Model A joke that it comes in any color you want…as long as you want black. If you just did it, you’d have just spent $200 or more on plastic shoes made in China. GE’s slogan would be reassuring if they didn’t do many more things each day to harm us than to lighten our load. And, I don’t understand what GM is talking about with the new Chevy campaign unless the ‘deep’ they are referring to implies rectal penetration.
Something we should all know by now is, that with very few exceptions, politicians don’t know anything or have chosen to ignore the things they do. You don’t have to know much to know that some things just don’t make sense. I mean, how can Ireland be bankrupt? They’ve got that Guinness, (the beer and the world records), and linen and U2. And don’t the English know that they are choosing to limit what future generations will know by pricing millions of kids out of a higher education? Oh, and here’s some military knowledge…killing keeps us safe, (that is if you’re not one of the ‘us’ being killed). I’m not sure if we need to know about the direction of the toilet bowl vortex above and below the equator, and I don’t think there’s a potential political promise there anyway.
Our newest version of the primordial ooze, the perpetual information cesspool, does not seem to be our intellectual evolutionary bridge, unless we are evolving into cartoon characters whose reality is imagined experience. Tweets are read around the world in minutes sharing wisdom that may be based in…well, nothing. How many millions of spammed surfers have set out on the journey to help Mr. Sun Yi of Singapore recover his frozen assets in Pad Nam Hussan Bank? Could it be possible that everyone just won a two-week vacation in the Bahamas? And, just a heads up, I bought a Magic Jack in the 80’s and it had nothing to do with cheap, unlimited phone service.
What we don’t know cannot only hurt us, it’s killing us. We don’t know where we came from so we make up stories, call it religion and then spend five thousand years pummeling one another over whose story is the best. We don’t know how to separate real creature comfort from the make-believe monetary version and so the world flies out of control due to a tic in the DJA. Too many of us didn’t pay enough attention in science class to know that the real science pointing at our abuse of and the catastrophic consequences facing our planet trump the naysayers. And, most of us don’t know how to dance the Tango or the Merengue, but we certainly know that Bristol can’t either.
What should we do? I don’t know.