I just started writing a post in which I typically danced around the issues at hand, choosing myself a nice neat metaphor around which I could curl my current feelings so that they were beautifully concealed from all other than the intended recipient.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. That’s the angle I was working. How these days, the default position is to not be fully in command of the facts. We are dripfed little snippets of information, and from these we infer whatever we like – or whatever we have decided to infer. We weave great webs of misinformation in which we eventually get caught, and then we struggle in vain to extricate ourselves.
It is the way the internet works for us … an awful lot of unconnected facts, many of which are either not as factual as they like to make out, or are rather stymied by their context. More likely to be misread than read.
And for all this, we crave that one thing which, we believe, will make us happy. The money, the job, the girl … and yet most often we get the money, we get the job, we get the girl … and that fails to be enough. We always want more money, that job, that girl. This fundamental dissatisfaction with our lot is the cause of much misery, yet it is also the building block of this society. Capitalism thrives on the principle that we always want more. We must have more. And every year we want more more. If we get less more, we’re a failure.
This is the fundamental intellectual and emotional position of the curious and interested amongst us. We want more even though it may pain us. But this is just information. Knowledge is something else entirely. Knowledge is the web which truly connects things, not the specious inferences we make from scattered pieces of stuff. Knowledge is something far, far greater.
Ironically, it can only take one word to make all of those tattered and tiny details suddenly fall into line, wriggle, take shape and reveal their true nature.
Sometimes, that one word is a word you might wish you’d never seen. Be careful what you wish for.