The Evil of Ignorance

I was thinking about what “evil”  is and many things [and people] immediately came to mind, but when I looked deeper into what I had initially deemed as evil, it really came down to these three things…

Close mindedness and ego go hand in hand. Often, when we do not like something we see or hear — or are otherwise confronted with, we close our minds and defer to our egos.

Close mindedness is an act of ego because it is easier to judge or question someone else’s thoughts/feelings/beliefs/facts than it is to judge or question any preconceived or ingrained belief of our own.

In some ways, close mindedness and ego are defense mechanisms.

If you already believe the sky is green, no one will be able to convince you the sky is really blue and the harder they try to convince you…the greener the sky becomes to you and the more involved your ego gets.

Close mindedness and ego blind the bearer and there is an inherent evilness in that; there is also no question this is a very real societal problem. In fact, much of the uninhabitable space of social media is driven by ego laden minds who are closed for business.

But, those things are not the evil of evils. The winner of that tiara is ignorance.

Being ignorant is not the same as being closed-minded. Ego drives close mindedness and yes, close minded people can be ignorant, but that sort of ignorance is still ego driven.

The ignorance I am talking about is the “ignorance is bliss” variety because the truth is, ignorance is evil.

Ignorance is evil because it is willful; it is a chosen attitude; a chosen way of being. Ignorant people do not care about the ramifications of their ignorance on the rest of us and to be sure, there are ramifications.

To use American politics as an example, when ignorant people prefer their phony facade of “bliss” to reality, they do not participate in the process. It takes all citizens to participate to make the process work properly; without all of us, the process is broken and therefore the results of a broken process allow for corruption and further evils. And, although I used politics as an example, ignorance [yours, mine or someone else’s] plays a part in the whole of society and it touches everyone.

DAY #15 OF NaBloPoMo, BlogHer, and NanoPoblano …

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