The Lost Art of Knowing

When one of the regulars down at Iona’s Salon and Nail Emporium gets to going on about how that good-for-nothing thing she married, only because she was pregnant and her mom insisted, is doing something she doesn’t quite approve of. Something like hanging pictures of scantily clad women up in his man cave, but no one really cares or even notices. She goes on about that all the time and he hangs up the pics just so she has interesting stories to tell when she stops by Iona’s every Thursday at 4:00. Being a regular at Iona’s does not carry much social or international import, as one might imagine. However, the same does not apply to someone who aspires to be the President of the United States. That office demands experience, temperance, wisdom, patience, formidable poker skills and perhaps more than anything else, the ability to make world-class errors, repair them as best as they can be repaired and just keep on keeping on as fairly as you can afford to be. It does not, and never will, require a thin-skinned revenge-a-maniac who is indulgently appeasing his every waking moment just so he doesn’t go wild doxing anyone in sight. Just because they never genuflected when in his presence.

Anything and everything that a person who is so unfortunate as to suffer being elevated to the office of President carries the weight of wars and taxes. And the knowledge of the most hateful of human atrocities, as well as the most noble of human sacrifice. The most stressfully-aging aspect of that office is knowledge which can never be unknown, once it is known. A President may not think he knows and he certainly may not feel he knows. He may not even believe he knows. A President has to know how he knows. Knowing how one knows seems to be an art which cannot be practiced in the Ewe Knighted States. Maybe it’s a lost art or maybe people would rather pretend they don’t care about the difference between knowing how one knows, thinking that one knows and believing that one knows.

It seems that everyone has a nose and a theory about some story about something that someone heard while they were high on some medically-approved substance. Every single one of those theories about anyone or anything from any of those stories from Q to Russian with love and golden showers is based on what someone thinks or believes. They are not based on anyone knowing how they know. I don’t mind that folks believe anything they want to, but I’m put off by folks who treat what they believe or what they feel, as knowledge.

The other day a car hit something at or near a border crossing between the United States and Canada. When the car impacted, it exploded. A major entertainment network, the one with pointy ears and red coat, reported that explosion as a terrorist attack. It wasn’t. It was some dude from upstate New York showing off his Bentley. He got airborne, which is not a characteristic that you would normally expect from even a well-engineered vehicle like those from Bentley. The only thing noteworthy in all this is that we can see one more time how that network with the pointy ears plays loosey goosey with knowledge. To even be asking questions about if we know where the occupants of the car were from or that it was a terrorist attack (which the on-air host did), is not reporting, because those are things we know are not true. At the time that the pointy ears network was reporting terrorism, no one had knowledge of what happened or even clues as to why it had happened, yet those of the pointy ears were saying they knew and knew how they knew. That was just not true.

What was true is that they hoped, aka believed, they were right. When women who live in the burbs do that, we call them Karens. It’s perfectly correct for anyone to consult their feelings and their beliefs to guide them according to their experiences. However, knowledge requires more than feeling like something is true and believing you know. Just because you believe with all of some undefined part of yourself, does not make that belief real.

This pointy ears gaff was nothing more than high-entertainment to be sure, but the notable part of the gaff is that the skulk of pointy-eared gossips posing as newsworthy news-gatherers did not bother to discover if they knew anything more than imagined hunting trumpets coursing through the forest of Green gossip, masquerading as Mar a Laredo truth. The entire skulk believes the gossip and adheres to it as though it’s important enough to lend importance to the gossip mongers. It’s pretty sad that respectable corporations prostrate themselves for profit at any cost. But then reporting feelings and beliefs as knowledge has cost that particular skulk and their masters an awful lot of money and it appears that the hunt for the sly little fellers is gaining strength.

There’s another level of representing belief as knowledge that is considerably more concerning than the entire skulk. It is fairly popular for a politician to represent him or herself as a dyed-in-the-wool bible thumper. Take that Cajun fella the Congress thought was all clean and innocent. It’s clear that he would make a great sacrifice. An innocent way of saying it is, it’s all his fault for anything that happens. The problem this Speaker represents is that he believes he understands the Bible. It’s a common error. We have all learned that we have to define the words and if we do that, then we can figure out what something means. But we have not learned how to develop knowledge. So…When The Johnson who is Speaker was asked what his agenda was, he got as cute as a button and said that if we were all to read the Bible we could see what his agenda was because it’s all written out right there in text that originated between 1,500 and 2,500 years ago. I think them Johnsons are real proud of themselves. Especially in the mourning of their sojourn as Speaker.

I don’t know about you but I have a hard time believing anyone who can not talk about his or her experiences which demonstrate the reality of their ideas. I expect that a person will believe what is real. I loathe people who claim knowledge without a clear way of demonstrating the experiences which converted the feeling and beliefs into knowledge. Maybe it would be a handy thing to ask people who are making claims about knowledge to explain the experiences they’ve had that makes their claim of knowledge real. They have to know the source of the idea and they have to have people who know and understand their claims, to verify that they have had appropriate experience to claim the knowledge which issues from their experiences.

So when the Speaker says man is fundamentally evil or the last guy claims that he won the election and that judges pick on him so he can’t get a fair break, we can check to see if they could have possibly had the experience which would give rise to the knowledge they claim. The Speaker can not possibly know that a flood is coming. He can believe that, but he does not know. He can even believe that abortion is America’s holocaust. It isn’t, and he is simply trying to sell his belief in things he just could not possibly experience. He has not talked with God. He does not have special knowledge about gay people which is in contrast to what is actually known about percentages of the population who identify as gay generation after generation. In other words, what that Johnson knows is not what he says he believes. He has the right to believe in the way he desires, but he does not have the right to insist that anyone else believe as he does. That’s even more true for people who insist on valuing knowledge. It’s appropriate to believe in Santa Claus, but that belief is not and never will be knowledge. It seems to me that should voting folks consider if any politician talks about the bull fertilizer, merely listen to see if the person is talking about experience he or she has had or about things they would like you to believe. If it’s the latter, it’s probably best to vote for someone else.

This blog was first published on December 9,2023.

The Wright’s View is a blog written by John Worthington and is presented by The Business of Forging Agreement.

For additional content in a daily email format, I invite you to subscribe to “The Wright’s View” on Substack. I write about the folly of the current political goings-on from outside of what the media presents in the hope of giving anyone who reads my blogs another vantage point to see beyond the minutiae of the everyday.