The root of ignorance is the word “Ignore” which clearly paints a picture of willingly refusing knowledge. It does not mean a lack of education or simply not knowing things, but our refusal to upgrade ourselves. We are led by what we believe and blinded by our ego which becomes an obstructed vision.
Have you ever noticed how people who are seemingly intelligent, do the most ignorant things because the people around them do? Instead of acquiring new understanding, they base their decisions on what is socially acceptable to others.
Learning
- Learning is a process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. It involves understanding, relating ideas, and making connections between prior and new knowledge, independent and critical thinking, and ability to transfer knowledge to new and different contexts.
- To know or discover is to arrive at a destination. It is finding our way rather than straying from the path, going in the wrong direction, going around in circles, wandering aimlessly, and failing to arrive at a destination.
- Everything that we do in life is a choice. And these choices define the quality of our life both short term in the moment, and in the long term. The choices we make, even the smallest ones, have an impact on our current reality. We choose it every time we see someone being insensitive and we allow their behavior to affect our life.
- Our intentions are only as good as our understanding of our environment. It’s our reason that grasps a thing as good, and then proposes that good to our will as something worth choosing. If our desire is wrong about what’s good, then our intention is bound to be wrong.
Knowledge
- Knowledge is a mansion with many rooms. We feel our way around each room, bumping into and becoming gradually familiar with the objects in it. Eventually we find the light-switch, and we can see everything in that room. Ignorance resides in most corridors, hallways, or stairways, and can only enter a room through curiosity instead of assumptions.
- We are responsible for our failures of knowledge no less than our failures of will. We obviously can’t know everything. But we do have a moral duty to try to know what’s necessary to act well. Not knowing because we don’t want to know, or because we’ve neglected to learn something we could easily have learned. Good intentions can’t redeem voluntary ignorance.
- The beginning of wisdom lies in the recognition of how little we really know. We live in an era when knowledge in the sense of information is constantly available in real time through computers, smart phones, electronic tablets, and book readers. And yet we still lack the basic skills of reflecting on such information, of sifting through the dirt to find the worthy nuggets. We are ignorant masses awash in information.
Arrogance
- It is an insulting way of thinking or behaving that comes from believing that we are better, smarter, or more important than others. someone who is arrogant thinks they are better or more important than other people and behaves in a way that is rude and too confident.
- An individual might willfully ignore something due to their arrogance, since an arrogant person thinks that they are better than everybody else, they might not be interested in learning others’ opinions. Arrogance can be caused by ignorance, when we consider ourselves better and more important than others.
- The experiences of life can help us outgrow our traditions. What may persist, however, is our lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and jumping into action without hearing the other side. Arrogance can lead a person to ignore something important, and ignorance of other’s abilities and talents can also make a person arrogant.
- When we form opinions, we do it based on something that happened to us, something that happened to a person we know, or something we saw, heard, or read. It is our refusal to take more than one source of information into consideration.
The only cure for this virus called “ignorance” is knowledge. Guard yourself from following the crowd and prevent the virus from spreading. In the age of information with instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously, there is no excuse for anyone not to do a little research.