Introduction to Not Knowing: Ignorance Saves

We have various intelligence agencies. But what we really need is an Federal Bureau of Ignorance, or Central Ignorance Agency.

True, our intelligence agencies are ignorant of much, and often behave stupidly, but that's not the type of ignorance we're talking about; there is negative ignorance and there is positive ignorance, and ironically, the latter may be the most important principle in maintaining our liberty.

Negative ignorance is easy to understand: for example, maybe I have a growing brain tumor, but don't know about it. Or perhaps a mugger is waiting for me around the corner. In those cases, knowledge helps.

But is ignorance ever really helpful? Yes, because it is intrinsically intertwined with our freedom. Freedom, in a certain sense, is a function of ignorance. If we always knew ahead of time what was going to happen, we wouldn't be free.

I was thinking about this last night while watching a frustrating loss by the Dodgers. Out of all the major sports, baseball is most subject to the realm of chance, AKA the unknowable unknown. In basketball, for example, the best team almost always wins, especially if the players apply themselves. But in baseball the best team will still lose roughly a third of the time, and the worst team will win a third of their games. Thus, the best skill and soundest strategy are often trumped by chance.

In fact, the very purpose of strategy is to minimize the role of chance. For example, it is generally preferable to use righthanded hitters against a lefthanded pitcher, and vice versa. However, doing so doesn't result in a sure thing. Again, the future is unknown, so our strategy is deployed in the effort to tame it somewhat.

There are a number of lines to this effect in No Country for Old Men, which is all about ignorance and luck:

Point bein', even in the contest between man and steer the issue is not certain.

Or this exchange, that shows how our rules of strategy, which are designed to reduce ignorance and tame the future, don't always work out (i.e., sometimes a righthand hitter will get a base hit off a lefthand pitcher):

Anton Chigurh: And you know what's going to happen now. You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it.

Carson Wells: You go to hell.

Anton Chigurh: [Chuckles] Alright. Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

But some people are ignorant of their ignorance:

Wendell: You think this boy Moss has got any notion of the sorts of sons of bitches that're huntin' him?

Ed Tom Bell: I don't know, he ought to. He's seen the same things I've seen, and it's certainly made an impression on me.

How little we really know:

Poolside Woman: Oh... that's who you keep looking out the window for?

Llewelyn Moss: Half...

Poolside Woman: What else then...?

Llewelyn Moss: Just looking for what's coming...

Poolside Woman: Yeah... But no one ever sees that coming...

This one is particularly relevant; I don't remember it in the film, but it's in the book:

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Or this:

People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things.

Another good one from the book, which certainly goes to our central topic, which is the role of government in eliminating ignorance and attempting to control the future:

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

Which immediately suggests an important electoral strategy of the left: if you want to justify the largest and most intrusive government possible, you'll need to create a lot of ungovernable people. A Blue Wave of them, as it were. No borders. No standards. A demographic invasion from below, as in California. This is a subject to which we will no doubt return.

In fact, this whole preface is by way of returning to the subject of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, which is so full of important insights that I'm having difficulty wrapping my mind around it. Maybe an amazon reviewer can sort it out for us.

the social order is produced by a complex array of institutions and behavioral norms, which have evolved and endure because they work. The Fatal Conceit of modern planners is to presume that the social order could be easily rearranged; but in fact the rationality of human planners is far more limited than the evolutionary ‘wisdom' that inheres in the complex rules of the free society.

This is helpful -- it's not just me:

Hayek wrote and published Law, Legislation, and Liberty on and off over a timespan of approximately 15 years, which were in part interrupted by ill health. Hayek admits that the result is at times repetitive and lacking in organization.

There are plenty of flashes of that true rhetorical brilliance characteristic of Hayek that can make his writings such a feast to the ear and mind. On the downside, however, these rhetorical gems are hidden in a large volume of pages that at times do indeed seem tedious, repetitive, and unorganized...

I suppose the ultimate insight is that rules are not -- and cannot be -- about guaranteeing outcomes, because that will undermine the very conditions of freedom and affluence. As in Venezuela, the state can guarantee a certain outcome only by eroding the conditions that make the outcome possible. But this is what the left does, every time. The first and last temptation of the left is denial of ignorance.

Hayek finds the philosophical base of totalitarian thought in the belief that "we can create the welfare with law, if we arrange it logically." That's why he calls every kind of totalitarian thought "constructive cartesian rationalism," because they all want to reform the whole world to realize their specific outcome...

By which he means that the world is not simple and linear, but complex and nonlinear. Treating a complex system as a simple one will generate disorder and bring about unintended consequences. For example, you can "raise taxes" on the simplistic assumption that the economy is a linear system. But doing so changes incentives and alters behavior throughout the system.

I have a number of notes to myself, for example, "The purpose of rules is to help us deal with the problem of not knowing what we cannot know." Or, "the essential problem is how to create a system in which we benefit from knowledge we do not possess, i.e., from our ignorance; or, how to utilize knowledge we don't have."

It calls to mind the famous essay about how no one knows how to make a pencil. Nevertheless, there are plenty of pencils for everyone. Think about it: if everyone who needed a pencil had to know how to make one, there would be very few pencils. Thus -- orthoparadox ahead -- it is specifically our ignorance that results in such an abundance of writing implements.

Contrast this with the Soviet Union, which would have attempted to predict ahead of time how many pencils are necessary, and marshal all the knowledge and resources necessary to manufacture them, inevitably resulting in too many or too few pencils due to a misallocation of resources. In this case, knowledge kills. Ignorance saves. Literally, if we're dealing with medicine and not just pencils.

Another note to myself: "funny how the left rejects intelligent design in biology but accepts it in economics."

All other animals consist of a repertoire of knowledge, so to speak. They know what they know (instinctively), and not only can they not fail to know it, they have no access to the much wider world of the Unknown. In other words, they don't know anything about ignorance, with the result that the are "sealed in knowledge" while being sealed from the ignorance that would free them.

Conversely, what really characterizes man -- even more than knowledge -- is our permanent state of ignorance. Ignorance is the prior condition of curiosity, wonder, and learning. And there is no end to it. If there were, then we would be as enclosed as any other animal, and thereby lose contact with the Absolute-Infinite that transcends us, and through which we "grow" by assimilating its substance.

Aphorisms.

--Intelligence does not consist in finding solutions, but in not losing sight of the problems.

--Politics is not the art of imposing the best solutions, but of blocking the worst.