My previous post on this topic focused on Trump’s nominations for critical cabinet and other positions in the executive branch. But I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to point out that the expression in the title applies to many other situations as well, one of which relates to a recent and unfortunate encounter I had on facebook with someone I knew from before undergrad. My friends know my views about social media: yes they give platforms equally to everybody, but look who uses these platforms more, and more loudly:

• Does a busy university professor or any other professional doing actual contributions to the society have extra time to spend posting random videos or even texts everyday on every conceivable topic? I am not denying exceptions, such as extremely valuable educational material by the same individuals I mentioned above, but they come with great sacrifices taken by those individuals to make time for such contributions, and are indeed quite rare.
• The rest of content on the social media is mostly
  • casual conversations among friends, which of course are very good and not something that I am critical of,
  • pointless videos and posts with absolutely zero value but seemingly outrageous to get clicks and subscriptions and serve as an income source through digital advertising, which still are not as harmful as the next category, and
  • angry and loud posts by individuals with no serious occupation, and mostly disseminating misinformation and disinformation and propagating the propaganda generated by of a certain extreme group or party.

Considering the fact that this last category constitutes the majority of the content on the social media platforms, my assessment is that the net contribution of social media to the society has been negative. So it should not come as a surprise if my activity on such platforms is very limited, except for sharing some of these posts on facebook (since at the moment I do not have any other means of publicizing this weblog) and hoping to receive comments and feedback from individuals with different points of view and hopefully learn from the exercise. I should emphasize that I am under no delusion, and know that these posts do not have any value as written art in literature, sociology, anthropology, politics, or any other form of social or even natural sciences; I am an engineer with no background in those fields especially art and literature, and have no claim on having any expertise in those areas. But I do try to read about things that I believe matter to the society at this time, be it recent news, legal rulings of federal or state courts, and even opinions handed down by the Supreme Court, and try to share them here along with my own opinions, as conversations between me and the reader, mainly with the expectation of learning something from the very helpful feedback I receive from the readers, mostly offline.

Anyways, since the sharing of these posts on facebook sometimes results in new friend requests, e.g., by friends of my friends, I have been logging into my facebook account more often recently than before, and unfortunately, in a couple of such occasions, I saw posts from the person I mentioned at the top of this post. This is not a gossip column, so I am not going to go into the details of the exchange between me and him. I am trying to quickly get to the point where it becomes relevant to the title of this post. What was baffling in those exchanges, though, was extreme arrogance and defensiveness against any critique, no matter how polite and carefully worded it was. I knew this person was very closely linked to the ruling dictatorship class (in my home country), and was not surprised to see him propagating the misinformation and disinformation of the propaganda machine of the government. But still, up until that moment, I was under the impression that he was a reasonable and somewhat knowledgeable person. So I was caught off guard when I saw such an irrational and arrogant response to my comments implying that what he had written was so complex and sophisticated that was above my head to even think about commenting on that, and that I needed to read at least a dozen different writers to be able to appreciate what he had written. And then there was the usual name droppings, mentioning the names of a couple of scientists, that “look, I even know the names of these scientists, so I must be very smart!” 🙂

Alas, it didn’t seem to occur to him that if he is really well read, as he claims, that should show in his writing, without the need for him to tag along his writings and tell everyone that he has read quite a few authors, and knows a few names of some famous or obscure scientists. I may be wrong, but I believe if you need to mention the names of the people from whom you believe you have learned something, you obviously haven’t learned enough to be able to write something of your own, as valuable or useful, or maybe even remotely so. Of course, this excludes explicit citations which are not intended to indicate a teacher-student relationship, but only denote pieces of text that are directly borrowed from the cited author’s writings, so that one does not need to regenerate or reiterate all the preamble in the cited document that was used in concluding the cited quote.

Back to our own topic, this idea and aspiration for being considered as being shrouded in mysticism, notions that not everybody can understand one except for the enlightened ones, is an unfortunate phenomenon in cultures similar to the one in which I grew up. It’s more like a plague that has penetrated all layers of society. Many people do believe that saying or writing things that not everybody can understand is a virtue. To the point of some such leaders literally uttering sequences of nonsensical words, only to claim that if you don’t understand what I am saying or think they are not correct or even don’t make sense, you are not enlightened enough. And of course, these statement often come with all sorts of name droppings, that I have been a student of so and so spiritual leaders.

I know this was a long segue around the the title of this post, but I am now ready to make my point, and that is the above are very clear examples of “ignorance is bliss”. Most of the people I mentioned above are not only unbothered about the ways they mislead others or are mislead by others, but rather are “blissful” in the “ignorance” that this is the way things should be. And my wish is that they continue taking lessens from each other so much that they sink deeper and deeper in the ignorance which they call enlightenment, until that ignorance becomes undeniably obvious to everyone, and hopefully the society is rid of them once and for all.