I am beginning to think that the root of the problem of the self — the problem of the Maya, of the illusionary and unfulfilling nature of life for some of us — is the issue of false knowledge. It’s the problem of ‘I KNOW’.
The illusion is the false knowledge. That’s why it’s so impenetrable and so present, so everywhere…it is a consequence of the self, of the limited nature of subjective experience.
We, as human beings, have to ‘know’ in order to move through life. We have to form beliefs about what is. There isn’t a way around it.
The Information Problem
We depend upon many sources of information for the knowledge we acquire, and the most fundamental knowledge came from our parents and our friends when we were very young.
They teach us what to think, who to associate with, what to believe about death, what to believe about sex. They teach us what love is and isn’t, what the value of life is, what the value of ourselves is.
We accept these beliefs early, and we internalize them. We don’t ‘know’ them in the way we know that gravity pulls things to the ground: the average child raised in a racist household doesn’t ‘know’ that people of color are inferior, but he believes it all the same, when he is young.
In the same way, you ‘know’ how certain members of society — authorities, women, Southerners, goths, jocks — will react in certain conditions. They are opinions, but they’re a special kind of opinion that doesn’t know itself for what it is: the place where we make a mistake is where we substitute a second-hand opinion for a truth.
If you believe from an early age that the wealthy are necessarily selfish and greedy, isn’t that limiting to yourself? Doesn’t it discourage you from pursuing money yourself, because of your unspoken and absolute belief in its corrupting influence and ‘the type of person’ that pursues it, which doesn’t fit in with ‘who’ you ‘are’?
Isn’t it better to give these opinions only the power due to them, and to determine for oneself, as fairly as possible, what the truth is?
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Problem
Using the example above, what would happen if an individual with this extreme view about wealth were to win the lottery?
Now, for no good reason at all, he has a dilemma. He has self-created the dilemma with his false knowledge about what rich people are ‘like’. Now, for no good reason, he may not know how to act.
On one hand he might give the money away rather thoughtlessly, in order to uphold his self-image, and devalue it unnecessarily. What could have done real good for himself or others is aimlessly discarded to demonstrate where money stands in relation to that individual.
On the other hand, he may keep the money and instead use this false knowledge to allow himself to become the exact sort of demeaning, greedy, self-interested ass he always swore rich people were. And why?
The self-fulfilling prophecy is that views both positive and negative can be acted upon, on the basis of false knowledge, and therefore perpetuate an essential untruth because of a failure to self-examine the view. Now the next guy thinks that rich people are assholes, do you see?
I think that this, this net of false knowledge, is the Maya, the illusionary web of crap that holds us all captive to ourselves (and the opinions of others).
The Value Problem
To continue the example…money is just money. Like anything else, it’s just a goddamn thing in the world, whose value varies from individual to individual; money itself is a powerful symbol because of the consensual value of it. It is something everyone wants, and therefore something that a lot of people have a lot of opinions about, true and false. Life, sex, food, money…they have consensual value, and therefore great power as cultural symbols. We are taught early and constantly that all these things are important, and disagreeing with that usually indicates a profound break from society.
Society — our parents, our friends, the media, our religion — tells us what value to give to things. There are things that society tells you to value — like health, money, status and sex — that may cause a tension or conflict within the self if the values conflict.
Sartre, unsurprisingly perhaps, said ‘Hell is other people’, and in this sense that’s very true.
I was once told that ‘if you want to control something, you have to understand it…and if you refuse to accept the truth of it, you will never understand it’.
The important thing, then, to avoid the illusionary nature of life and gain a more complete understanding and freedom…is to know the difference between what you know and what you just think.
It’s easy enough to think that all religious Southerners are somehow stupid, but if one lives in NYC and has never seen a religious Southerner outside of TV, then what the hell is he opining for, to be blunt about it? He doesn’t know, so why claim to?
Well, because it’s an us-vs-them thing. It underlines the fact that he, being neither Southern nor religious (presumably), is not stupid.
Great, huh.
On the matter of TV, or any media really, it hasn’t done anything to us we didn’t make it do. TV does perpetuate false knowledge, but that isn’t unilateral….I give a lot of shit to television, but in the long run it may actually help challenge false knowledge, given that people give enough of a shit to find out what’s true and what isn’t.
In the long and the short of it, conflicting ‘facts’ are important to sort out, even if it doesn’t seem important. Why else was it so important that Jesse Owens, a black man, won four gold medals in front of Adolf Hitler? Because Hitler was working with a fat basket of false knowledge, and the truth speaks for itself.
And With No Language But A Cry 