I don’t know.
People should be happy to utter that much more often than we do. I don’t know is a wonderful phrase. It doesn’t, as you might think, betray your stupidity – what does that is making up an answer to disguise said fear of stupidity – it simply means “I don’t know”.
I don’t know how to put up a shelf for example. I don’t know how to cope with the unending cycle of rejection in my life. And I don’t know why people don’t say I don’t know enough.
There seems to be a tendency to simply be contrary. One may not know the alternative to capitalism or big agri-business, so it’s much easier to just be anti all of it. Anti-globalisation is just the nihilistic temper tantrum of a hormonal teenager. It offers up no alternative, and instead does the equivalent of stomping up the stairs and slamming its bedroom door. Being anti-something usually leads to smashing a window as sixty-eight photographers take your picture, then moaning about how your message is being buried by a media more interested in showing the violence. If you don’t have a message other than “booo”, there’s nothing to report. You might as well chain yourself to something and hold up a sign that says “Careful Now” or “Down With This Sort Of Thing”.
The left leaning movements used to stand for something, whether it was progressive taxation, liberty or universal human rights, now they just seem more interested in sticking a finger up at things. These are hardly new thoughts I know, but this is just a thought vomit.
The most vile people who won’t say I Don’t Know are the anti-vaccination crowd. We don’t know what causes autism, but we do know what doesn’t cause it. Instead of accepting this, and attempting to help find an answer, they threaten the herd immunity and actually put lives at risk.
A newborn baby in Australia died of Whooping Cough recently. She was born into a community that had a low uptake of vaccinations and was too young to be immunised. Herd immunity would have protected her, and in a documentary about this case, an anti-vaxxer had the despicable temerity to claim Whooping Cough isn’t fatal. She clearly doesn’t know.
Not knowing something is fine, but being too self-centred to think you know better than people who do know can be tragically dangerous.
