The Rationality of Ignorance

Ever since Sigmund Freud triumphed with his psychological theories, psychological repression has become interpreted as an acceptable behavior. Repression is now OK, because everyone does it.

This post is not about psychology – at least not in the first place.

It’s about ignorance. Ignorance is very widespread in today’s culture. When people „block“ someone on social media, they are simply ignoring them. Likewise, when people ignore their spam email folder, they often say that if something is important, then the person will write again. Hello? Write again?!? LOL, many people are so ignorant that they are even unaware of their own ignorance.

OK, so perhaps: If it’s important they will call on the phone. Ah, yes: the elexir of voicemail! That splend circular file of phone ladders. I am sure people check their voicemail daily… NOT!

Ignorance is nothing knew – even Galileo was the recipient of being ignored. No, even worse: He was considered a heretic. Being a heretic means: If someone doesn’t ignore you, then they must be crazy.

In contrast, I believe everyone can choose for themselves who or what they wish to ignore. To some degree, the vast majority of people on the planet ignore global warming every day. You can ignore this politician or that politician – which one you ignore is entirely up to you. I by and large ignore retard media – though I do keep tabs on what kinds of nonsense other people do seem to pay attention to. Perhaps, though, in reality they really don’t pay attention to it (yet again: many people merely think they don’t pay attention to advertisements; and of course very few people are aware of the fact that most advertisements actually pay more attention to them than the other way around – at least for the vast majority of illiterate people who do not know how to prevent such „invasions of privacy“). They might say something like „I ignore ads“. Uh-huh, yeah, right.

I feel it is very ironic that in this era of „big data“, people are very much involved in a habit of ignorance. Yet again: Here – as in many other examples of what seems to be a quirky kind of rationality – there appears to be a somewhat rational rationalization for this behavior: We cannot pay attention to everything, so we have to ignore something.