Strive Toward Knowing Things Instead of Knowing of Things
Or something like that.
I now believe that if you do not put in the time and effort to be in deep resonance with some subject matter, then you generally shouldn’t speak on the material, and if you choose to, it should come from admitted ignorance and genuine curiosity, not performed authority. Parroting someone else who themselves spent little time with the material and then distilled it even further to present to their audience is not knowing something it is knowing of something. This is why I believe removing western societal filters has been detrimental to public discourse, and to a larger extent, society more generally. When anyone can speak to millions of people without a single credential or reputation(I’m participating in quite the irony here, i am well aware), we are drowned by a sea of effortless mediocrity or worse, lies. People who are more skilled at knowing of things become celebrities while the actual specialists, who’ve poured over the material for thousands of hours, are merely footnotes.
I had written this earlier as a note but having seen this post on my feed I feel like it warranted an entire article.
Keeping true to this principle is difficult because it is quite common an expectation for individuals to have an opinion on everything. When something controversial is spotlighted in the news, your friends may run to you with their “view” on the matter and ask for yours. Responding with an “I can’t speak on this because I am not informed” is clearly frowned upon. What is praised is immediate reaction and taking sides.
We should take more pride is admitting ignorance and start shaming the willy-nilly assertion of knowledge without effort, without receipts. Mostly, it is those who pontificate that should be shamed into penance and we all know who those certain few are.
All that said, I am totally aware that giving a microphone to the masses does a lot of good as well. It gives more power to individuals to be able to defend against political, corporate, and federal cartels. Also, I wouldn’t want to take the mic away from someone who is clearly informed but not formally credentialed or with an established reputation, because the institutions that provide those things may themselves be corrupted. Lastly, and most importantly, one can critique something based off pure logic and reasoning (which is more fundamental) without having dived deep into the material. And there are a myriad of other instances where my initial assertion fails to apply. I’m speaking more to the general discourse on social media where everyone suddenly has an opinion on every single situation, or are forced to have one. Most relevant being Nolan’s Odyssey film and how everyone is suddenly an expert on film technique, the business side of movie production, or the literature itself.
Initially, I had an opinion based off of other’s assertions(not having seen the film myself), but after reading more into it, I realized that I didn’t know jack, and jack is on vacation: I never read the book, there are different translations, which translation did Nolan use as source material, how are these translations interpreted themselves by experts, the historical context of the Epics, how much influence did 3rd parties have on the production, and so on and so forth. I no longer have an opinion.
I have, however, ordered a boxed set of The Illiad and The Odyssey (Fagel translation) which I am eager to read. (I did read The Illiad many years ago, don’t remember which translation, but all I remember was Achilles, DIomedes, and Ajax talking to or being helped by Gods in battle, how brutal it was all described in detail, and perhaps more interestingly how human such an old story felt where Dad’s were mad at their daughters(I may be misremembering).
At some point in maturation you realize that mostly everything online is either a misrepresentation or an outright lie. There are videos advertising my home town as some welcoming and cool community when in reality it is a shithole. Every single vlog you see on youtube is a highlight of hours of otherwise terrible and antagonistic footage, antagonistic in that is disrupts the narrative being presented. All news is filtered 10 times before it reaches the mouthpiece that is some eceleb spewing the “facts”. You cannot understand something by being given the “gist”. You are seeing a sliver of the reality. It takes hours and days, not five minutes.
When Licoln debated Douglas in 1858, he reminded the audience that “it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk”. The audience wasn’t informed by short-form spins raping their minds ad infinitum as they checked their feeds in between every single action of their day. Instead, they were well-read and prepared for the debate. They had pure focus on the ideas being argued. Imagine asking people today to withstand hours of debate over a couple of topics; no commercial breaks, no advertisements, no celebritization of the speakers.
If there is one thing out of this wall of text that i’d like to say it is: Admit ignorance and strive towards knowing things instead of knowing of things, especially if you wish to speak on them.