The pressure to be understood (and make a moral issue out of it)

The overestimation of enlightenment has its effect in the presumption of the ubiquity of knowledge.

There are things we all do not know. But lack of knowledge is somehow linked to a sense of moral failure. Why? Because knowledge is presumed to be freely available. (It isn't). Those who do not know everything and anything are deemed to have somehow morally failed. Yet they are merely being human.

The moral failure is actually elsewhere; presumption that it is entailed in not knowing something is merely a decoy forcing the attention away from the locus of the real moral failure.

The real moral failure: failing to ask others to fill us in on what we really do not know.

The real moral failure: failure to disintinguish between what one does and doesn't know, and acting arrogantly and prematurely.

The real moral failure: blaming others for their misfortune in life, because they simply haven't learned something.

The real moral failure: Attributing nefarious motives to others because they simply do not share your point of view (or do not come from the same culture as you do).

The real moral failure: Asserting that one knows everything and that one does not have to learn.

The real moral failure: Being misunderstood and putting that down to the evil nature of those who misunderstand (who might be indeed evil -- but check first!)



*********