Ever heard of the phrase "Ignorance is bliss"? It's a common phrase used to refer to how people don't want to learn the truth or facts about something and believe that it's better for them to now know. The phrase stands on the logic that we don't have to know everything and not everything we know is good for us but is that really true? Is being oblivious to the facts and truth really helpful and good for us or just a way for us to escape reality?
Most people when they think of "ignorance is bliss" think of things that are disgusting and terrible and any sort of information that's not useful or pleasant to them. This is the case for most people because whenever we encounter ideas that oppose ours or things we think of as vulgar, we immediately push it away rather than being accepting of it. We would rather not tolerate things we don't need to tolerate rather than approaching the idea or issue and trying to "dissect" it. Our mind is in the state of denial, of rejection and we would prefer to not deal with the hard, cold fact, thus generating the concept of "ignorance is bliss" to avoid dealing with ideas that are controversial.
Sometimes excessive knowledge can be harmful and it might not in your best interest to know about it, but it does not imply that we should not be trying to learn and understand. We can be ignorant of unimportant information that doesn't affect our lives and are not useful in any way, but when we resort to ignorance every time we hear something that isn't to our liking, that's when ignorance becomes bad. For example we wouldn't care about the food someone ate for breakfast or need to acknowledge that ants have an ant queen. We could ignore trivial facts that don't have much use to us, but we can't ignore important information that pertains to our lives like the existence of global warming or that the top 1% of the people in America holds most of the wealth in US. When we become oblivious to problems, ideas, issues, and people around us just because ignorance is bliss, we become the ignorant fool that is always lost and unreasonable, the person you see everyday that doesn't know what's going on and isn't willing to know what's happening.
When we turn to highly debatable issues, ignorance seems to be the primary choice of action. When we get confronted by issues with both sides having a strong argument, we choose to remain oblivious to the problem, ignore its existence, and go along with our lives before it affects us without knowing that the issue is already influencing our daily lives. When we turn towards ignorance as a solution for problems, we essentially prolong the inevitable, hoping that the issue would just go away without us knowing it; it's similar to how we procrastinate on our deadlines except there's no deadlines for issues, only consequences. We always demonstrate ignorance when we become oblivious to the argument of the opposite side. When confronted with challenging arguments, many people meet it with either ignoring the argument, devaluing the person making the argument rather than challenging the argument itself, claim that their argument and facts are false, or directing the attention away from the argument to their own side of the argument.
We live in a world today where people don't sit down and have a nice debate over factual arguments. We no longer have the concept of having a nice debate over each other's argument and finding holes in each other's arguments to challenge them. What we have resorted to is the barbarian-like behavior of being ignorant and self-righteous, being the narcissist that believes in only themselves and not reasoning. We attempt to avoid information that we don't like or burdens us, avoiding the responsibility of having that information, so we devalue the source of that argument or just completely ignore it. This, in the end, would only cause more misunderstanding and ignorance from both sides, leaving an issue unresolved and more aggression from both sides of the issue. So, in the end, is ignorance really worth it? Is it worth the procrastination to push away problems that are there and just ignore the consequences that influence our lives?
