Is it better to live in ignorance, or be haunted by the truth? I personally believe the truth will set you free. Others would choose to believe ignorance is bliss. So what is better, to be free or to live in bliss? Obviously it is up to the individual to make that decision. Life is not black and white, but how can anyone make a well educated decision if they do not know the whole story? Indeed it is comforting for others to share the same view point, but can we differentiate ideology from reality? It is human nature for us to believe what we see and to accept it as fact, but we must also learn to recognize when we cannot fully understand a matter and to accept it as part of a larger whole instead casting our opinions as facts.
Imagine you were a prisoner in a cave. Now this wasn’t an ordinary cave, this cave is the only world you have ever known. This cave IS your world. You are chained to the walls unable to move, and the only thing you can see is shadows being casted from passersby. Would you be content seeing the shadows? Or would the desire to fully understand and comprehend the shadows be overwhelming? The desire to understand is innate. Would you fight those instincts for the sake of maintaining a norm? Or would you give in to intellectual curiosity? Call me weak willed, but I would have to find out what exactly I was looking at. Even though I see shadows and hear echoes, I wouldn’t be able to rest until I knew for sure what was going on. I couldn’t be content with just speculation.
To some, that can be scary. I have met a few people in my life who would rather maintain a counterproductive routine instead of perusing enlightenment. Truth may set you free, but it doesn’t automatically mean that it does not hurt. There are risks being taken when ever some one dares to go against the grain. Banishment and scorn are the risks we take when we aspire for enlightenment over ignorance.
Galileo believed the world universe was heliocentric and not heliocentric and faced a lot of criticism for it. Even though everyone else swore the world was the center of the universe, he stayed true to his beliefs. He may have been one of the only human beings at the time to believe the world was the center of our solar system, but that didn’t stop his intellectual pursuits. He may have been a pariah, but he could not silence the voice in his head telling him to seek the truth. He could not live in a blissfully ignorant world that was geocentric when he thought all facts pointed to the universe being heliocentric . If more people thought this way, there is no telling the kind of discoveries we could have made and or missed.
To live in a cave and be ignorant to the outside world is to deprive us of our essence. We want to learn. We can’t help but to cast opinions on anything we perceive. We cannot fight this urge. It occurs every day when we see something new, or see things from a new perspective. Often in society we reject opinions that deviate from our own, but instead we should learn how to appreciate and identify with any observation because it is in our nature to learn, and change from those experiences.
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