Is ignorance bliss?

[hyphenate]

It's gotten really difficult to show outrage any more. After five plus years, my ability to continue to show shock at some of the crimes of this administration are waning. All I can do is shake my head and add the data to an already overflowing filing cabinet in my brain.

We suffer so much from too much information. It gets harder and harder to keep our sanity intact with that much overload. And until the beginning of the 20th century, this was never such an overwhelming problem. Until the information age gave us the knowledge of the entire world, perhaps we were better off in our little corner of the globe, not knowing how so much terror, horror and emotional upheaval existed elsewhere.

Would we be better off with less knowledge? Would we be able to function better with self imposed ignorance of many events that happen in the world? In the old days of mythology, there were god and goddesses who shared the burden of areas where there was supposed to be too much information. The Fates, for example, didn't watch you from birth to death--there was one to take care of you to birth, another to watch you over the years of your life, and another who cut the string of your life when it came time for you to die.

In our modern world, up until the end of the 19th century, people actually had great parties to welcome travellers who have been in other parts of the world, and to hear their stories of these places. And even then, the travellers were never full experts on the cultures they visited, but they were never expected to be.

I think that was also good for another reason--we had respect for people of other cultural backgrounds because we didn't know everything we need to know, and we made no excuses for it. We could be properly respectful of them, and not carry a lot of preconceived notions around with us.

Nowadays, we travel with a huge amount of hubris, taking our prejudices and other hang-ups with us, and don't take the time to appreciate everything in other cultures. We seem to think we know more about a lot of other cultures through these routes of information, but in fact, we don't--it only looks that way. But few take the time to research their travel destinations and learn to understand what makes each people unique. We seem to concentrate on the similarities, without embracing the differences.

If we could stop this arrogance, stop our endless "need" to know everything, and simply face the fact that our brains and minds were never designed to carry so much all the time, perhaps we would have less stress and less hang-ups about things.

I guess it's nice to know that halfway around the world people are dying, that people are being killed on a daily basis, that children are being killed in some societies just because they are female, that men torture and kill women in some cultures because they enjoy holding this stranglehold on women, and that many beautiful wild animals are killed each day, leading the way to extinction and so on and so forth, but I wonder.......would we be better people if we never knew this? Would we be more respectful of others in the world if we knew less about them? I think we might be able to return to a more mannerly society if we didn't force ourselves to know everything there was about everything in the world, because there is no way anyone can hold that much knowledge without the requisite wisdom on how to use it and when to use it.