Who Benefits from your Ignorance?

Without education and curiosity, where do we stand? Who stands to benefit from Ignorance?

Above: Harriet Tubman

I recently read (and loved) Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert, a fictional novel by Bob the Drag Queen. I was very intrigued by this quote in particular, which is said by the Harriet Tubman in regards to literacy among enslaved people in the United States:

"The folks that could afford slaves were sure as hell not fighting in the war. Instead, it was poor and uneducated white people, and Blacks being convinced or forced by the ones with all the money. You gotta keep folks ignorant if you wanna control them. That's why they didn't want us reading or writing."

- from Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen, emphasis mine

This idea of keeping people ignorant in order to control them is a disturbing one, and I think one that we see at play a lot in our current landscape. As I have read more books this year, I have recognized a common thread about education and curiosity across a few books, and how these things in particular combat ignorance and the spread of noxious doctrine. 

If you are being asked to skim the surface, and not look closely at reports, claims, and numbers, think critically for yourself-- who stands to benefit from your ignorance? How is your ignorance keeping you down? Who is speaking and what claim do they have to accuracy, authority? Below are a few experts who weigh in on the matter.

From The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor

Curiosity also poses a threat to neo-liberal doctrine, as Ronald Reagan made clear in 1967, when he served as governor of California. The state, he huffed at a press conference, should not be "subsidizing intellectual curiosity." Like his close ally Margaret Thatcher, Reagan aimed to increase the wealth of the few by reducing the security of the many-and shrinking higher education was a top priority. At the time Reagan made his remarks, he was busy waging a war on the state's colleges and universities, particularly the University of California at Berkeley, then the crown jewel of the American post-secondary education system [...] But most of all, he hated that they were able to learn for free. Shrinking the education commons, and imposing a higher price on university degree programs, was a way of limiting curiosity, which Reagan deemed a "luxury" the public could not afford. 

p.40 

The real point of conspiracies, like any article of dogmatic faith, is to avoid the discomfort and insecurity of not knowing by taking shelter in certitude. Conspiracists, then, do not actually question authority or expertise, as they often claim; they discount and reject it. Real questioning, in contrast, involves genuine curiosity and uncertainty and the acceptance of possibly being wrong.

p. 144

You cannot have real curiosity, or creativity, if everything is locked down and you know what comes next. Being open to new ideas means being open to your own limitations; being willing to experiment means being willing to possibly fail, and also willing to learn something that might change you. The radical openness of curiosity makes it anathema to fundamentalists and dogmatists.

p. 145

[...] knowledge, unlike food or water, can't be used up, and the desire to learn isn't a need that evolved to be satiated. The boundlessness of curiosity is what makes us learning animals; it is what makes us human. Curiosity is something we can safely be consumed by, since consuming knowledge enriches us without creating waste.

p.152

What we need, instead, is a system of education that is pub-lic, universal, reparative, and free. By public I mean funded by public dollars, not by tuition or by debt. By universal, I mean a space for everyone at every stage of life, where all subjects can be explored. By reparative, I mean an education system designed to acknowledge and actively redress past and ongoing social inequalities. By free, I mean in both price and purpose: education must be free in cost and aimed at freedom by unbinding curiosity. Should these conditions be met, education could actually be the motor of equality, opportunity, and learning so many of us want it to be. If we dedicate more public resources to cultivating curiosity, we can all be more secure.

p.153

From Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World by Scott Shigeoka 

For this reason, as we grow up and become more certain about the world, most of us leave curiosity to the children. The problem is, research shows that curiosity is critical for learning throughout the entirety of our life, not just at childhood. In fact, a meta-analysis of dozens of studies and over one million participants found that we actually get more curious as we age into adulthood and middle age, and even as we become elders. The only slight decrease in curiosity happens as our cognitive faculties decline, such as when we are nearing death. Therefore, that widely held idea that kids are more curious than adults- because they ask more questions than us— is actually a myth! 

p. 21-22

If we don't direct our curiosity toward what's outside of us, we can become insular and overly self-focused. This can breed narcissistic or egotistical behaviours, decaying our ability to be sensitive and empathetic to the wants and needs of others. When we spend time and energy directing our curiosity outward, we reduce the risk of clinging on to a more individualistic mindset (such as the self-help trope that your only priority is for you to show up fully rather than to also consider how others are feeling). When we practice outward curiosity, we adopt a more collective and harmonic mindset that recognizes the inherent truth that we are all interconnected— to each other and to the planet.

p.21

From The Courage to be Disliked: The Japanese phenomenon that shows you how to change your life and achieve real happiness by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga 

PHILOSOPHER: Yes. Equal, that is to say, horizontal. For example, there are men who verbally abuse their wives, who do all the housework, with such remarks as "You're not bringing in any money, so I don't want to  hear it" or "It's thanks to me that there's food on the table." And I'm sure you've heard this one before: "You have everything you need, so what are you complaining about?" It's perfectly shameful. Such statements of economic superiority or the like have no connection whatsoever to human worth. A company employee and a full-time housewife simply have different workplaces and roles, and are truly "equal but not the same"

YOUTH: I agree entirely.

PHILOSOPHER: They are probably afraid that women will grow wise to their situation and start earning more than men do, and that women will start asserting themselves. They see all interpersonal relations as vertical relationships, and they are afraid of being seen by women as beneath them. That is to say, they have intense, hidden feelings of inferiority.

YOUTH: So in a sense, they are getting into a superiority complex in which they are trying to make a show of their abilities?

PHILOSOPHER: So it seems. In the first place, the feeling of inferiority is an awareness that arises within vertical relationships. If one can build horizontal relationships that are "equal but not the same" for all people, there will no longer be any room for inferiority complexes to emerge.

p. 181-182, emphasis mine