Ignorance IS Bliss
Unless or Until It IS NOT
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.
Donald Rumsfeld
And I would say that is not the complete picture, but we’re getting there; there is
what we know,
what we think we know but just ain’t so,
what we know that we don’t know, and
what we don’t know that we don’t know.
That second category, oft omitted but very important, is from Mark Twain;
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
This is how I see it.
I think we know, as a species, something less than 1% of what there is to know. If someone can prove me wrong, I’m willing to listen, but I think it’s impossible to know for sure, so my estimate is as good as any. Just thinking about the limits, or rather the absence of limits, to concepts such as the infinite, and the infinitesimal, is enough to get me to less than 1%, as a species. Then for an individual such as myself, what can I know for certain; some exceedingly small fraction of even that 1% number it seems to me.
I remember, back in the ‘16 election cycle I think it was, they are starting to run together; there was a lot of labeling as “ignorant” going on.
We are all ignorant of most of what there is to know; the mark of a true ignoramus is found when one, the ignoramus, labels others as ignorant while remaining steadfast in the ignorance of his own near-total ignorance.
What brings me to this post you ask? It came to my attention that we, and I include myself in “we,” have a tendency to assume that some folks should be or are less ignorant in a particular “space” than they in fact are; I was reminded of this during our trip to the ER and hospital recently.
Over the course of four days, we were told verifiable falsehoods or given bad advice by three different credentialed health care professionals.
While in the ER Geri tested positive for Covid and something must have slipped out of my mouth regarding the possibility of a false positive, to which the nurse replied with words including "there is no such thing as a false positive" test for Covid. Let's call that strike one; False Positive Results With SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR Tests.
Within an hour of being admitted to the hospital in K’zoo the next day, “a Doc wanted to put Geri on Remdesivir, (strike two) which Geri refused, and wisely. It actually blows my mind that they even proposed it, because even the WHO has come out against Remdesivir as ineffective at best, it is dangerous at worst.”
Again according to my contemporaneous notes, since day one in the K’zoo hospital we had been asking about intravenous Vitamins C & D plus Zinc to boost Geri’s immune system. On day two “We asked about the Vit C, D and Zinc IV's again, to which he <another doctor> responded in part, and I quote, ‘no proven medical benefit.’” Strike three.
It would be nice to be able to safely assume that someone with apparently appropriate credentials knows all there is to know, or at least knows what he doesn’t know, but unfortunately, again, it just ain’t so. Zinc, Vitamin D and Vitamin C: Perspectives for COVID-19
I’m not including any names, but if Bronson Health is interested, they can reach out for places, dates and times.
This was all-too-reminiscent of a health scare that Geri and I had back in ‘14 when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease. Suffice it to say here (I wrote about it on the Primal Woods blog) that the problem was resolved by diet, because Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune disease. When the doctors saw that the nodule had been reduced in size by 25% in just 6 months, and when I told them we had accomplished that with diet alone, they literally laughed. Of course the diet that resolved the problem runs entirely counter to the dietary guidelines of the USDA. As we saw during the Covid nightmare, the government dictates what can and cannot be termed health care, or healthy, including voices to be censored on any and all subjects, and the government dictates dietary rules, and has since 1977, of huge impact on the health of the population, especially on anyone accepting federal funding; think schools, the military, prisons, etc.
What’s the point? The point is that when it comes to your health you cannot afford, in any sense of the word, to be ignorant. Furthermore, you must identify those other areas where you cannot afford for whatever reason to remain ignorant, and as I am fond of saying, put someone in your blind spot!
Where no counsel is, the people fall: But in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.
Proverbs 11:14 KJV
I’ve been keeping for years now what I call a “Principles for Living” document; it comprises a philosophy I suppose, and two of its elements seem on-point:
Government: Distrust and verify; exponential relationship between distance to the government and the amount of distrust and verification required
Government: experiments should not be conducted on a Federal level, with 330,000,000 people as the subjects of the experiment (ACA, Food Pyramid, novel vaccines, etc.)
Jeff Foxworthy has a series, very funny, titled You Might Be a Redneck If… I’ve always loved that series. Here’s a little spin on it…
You Might Be Ignorant If… you take anything from the government or mainstream media, now simply an organ of government, as truth. Distrust and verification is called for whenever any official of government, or his or her mouthpiece, says or writes anything, on any subject, in any place, at any time, even if it is said or written under oath.
Have a nice day.