Your Ignorance Doesn't Make You An Expert

Let's go chasing waterfalls.

Today, cousins, I want to share with you the words of a towering figure in modern philosophy named Arya Hamendani. But first, some thoughts from a couple lesser though still significant recent lights of human awareness.

The Christian apologist and sometime fantasy author C.S. Lewis once told a story about the end of the world, for children. In the story, there are some dwarfs who had seen through the machinations of a talking ape who fancied himself a king. This was a great charlatan primate in ill-fitting clothes whose constant lies and bullying machinations confused and cowed most of the other magical beings in the land of Narnia. They'd been thrown into a barn, the dwarfs, detained for their opposition. This being a book for kiddies, though, magic was afoot and the barn had actually transformed into a sort of Edenic landscape clearly meant to evoke heaven. This transformation was not in effect for the dwarfs, though—all they could see was the barn, and nothing that anyone could do would make them see or smell or taste anything other than things you find in barns. They were skeptics about everything, in the end, the dwarfs, not just about ape-kings, but also about the splendor unfolded all around them. It's a metaphor about the usefulness of skepticism and its limits, and how people who confuse skepticism for knowledge might miss a lie but will leave themselves unable to detect truth even when truth lies all around. Metaphor-resistant people tend to take metaphors like this one (which are ironically enough about metaphor-resistant people) to form dogmas about the importance of accepting dogmas. More on this soon enough.

In the movie The Matrix, a working drone named Anderson discovered that he was actually living in a simulation along with all the rest of humanity, and that the world he knew was only an illusion. In the movie, this was truth that only Anderson (renamed Neo) and a small coterie of like-minded friends could detect or handle, and this made them special in ways that nobody else was, and gave them the superhuman ability to download human knowledge and expertise at the push of a button. The movie is a metaphor, created by two trans sisters, meant to tell a deeply personal tale of breaking free of societal norms to access the power of knowing your true self. Metaphor-resistant people have taken this narrative to mean that reality is a simulation and only they and a small coterie of their friends are equipped to detect it, that their skepticism about the nature of reality places them on a higher plane than the rest of humanity combine, that nothing that takes more than a matter of minutes to learn is worth knowing, and that literally nobody else in the world without their special knowledge matters, so it's OK to kill the unknowledgeable if you need to because others aren't real in the same way as they are.

So now back to the great philosopher Hamendani.

Hamendani is not a professional philosopher, it should be noted; according to his Instagram bio he's a private chef and a food content creator, and a quick stroll through his feed bears this claim out, at least insofar as almost all of his content involves him shouting about cooking food, and especially about not fucking it up. I just watched the first fifteen seconds of a video of him shouting about the right way to make a fucking burrito. Then I watched the first fifteen seconds of a video of him shouting about the right way to make fucking salads. I decided that was enough food-shouting for me, but the general vibe is that cooking-wise you are fucking everything up and it is up to him, Arya Hamendani, to show you the right fucking way to fucking do it. To his credit, he really seems to know the right fucking way to make a fucking burrito, or at least a right way—there are many right ways to make a burrito. His burrito looks pretty good is my point. He seems to have the authority of knowledge he claims in the food space. I'd trust him.

More than a chef and a food guy, though, I'd say Hamendani's best classified as a professional or semi-professional internet shout-guy. There are a lot of ways to go pro on the internet; "shout-guy" is just one option, although it must be said that "shout-guy" appears to be one of the most popular and lucrative paths to internet fame. "Whisper-girl" also seems to rate highly, although it seems with the right approach you can also be a whisper-guy or a shout-girl, and there are dozens if not millions of other ways to be an internet pro, and of course hundreds if not trillions of subjects to shout or whisper about—what a glorious world of choice we inhabit!

It wasn't food content that brought this modern giant of amateur philosophy to my attention, though. No, what put Hamendani onto my for-you feed was a hand-held video, that is shot, seemingly extemporaneously, on a mountain hike. The impetus for this video is that Hamendani encountered a waterfall, which is not uncommon on mountain hikes, since mountain hikes tend to feature heights down which things like water might fall. Many mountain waterfalls are pretty as hell, and this one sure seems like it was. Hamendani, faced with this natural splendor, used his phone camera to deliver this deathless commentary at decibels slightly louder than a waterfall. (Note: so as not to detract from the substance of the message, I excised about a dozen instances of different permutations of the word "fuck" so just feel free to scatter them back in where you see fit)

Can someone explain to me how a waterfall works? Where does this water come from? It's just unlimited water? Comes down forever? And then you might say "Oh, it comes from, like, a lake, or an ocean." What, there's a ocean on top of the mountain? Where does this water keep coming from? Oh, is it snow melting? What are you talking about? What are you actually talking about? It just comes unlimited? Forever? Unlimited water comes down? Where does it come from? And if it comes from an ocean or a lake, does it just climb up, defying gravity? And you might say, Arya, are you on drugs right now? No! I'm not! I'm just curious because I don't think anyone actually knows where the water comes from.

Much to consider. Much to ponder.

Let's start.

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To begin: we have the fact of the philosopher's confusion, which by itself isn't extraordinary, although it does seem improperly defined. The thing the philosopher takes issue with is the unlimited nature of the water's flow, after all, not the fact that gravity works upon it, so I'd say the philosopher objects not so much to the existence of waterfalls, but rivers. This quibble aside, it actually is strange that rivers just flow seemingly without cease. The way such a thing works isn't immediately apparent. There are things to learn.

But the philosopher then progresses to applying his own specific and localized lack of knowledge to literally everyone else in the world—which is extraordinary, if rather unfortunately common. We've never had more access to collective human knowledge, or more access to those who have dedicated themselves to mastering some sliver of it and are eager to share their expertise, yet despite this we have no shortage of people who have decided, when faced with mystery, not to learn from the knowledgeable, nor even to investigate the answer, but to rummage into their pocket, take out the same device that could inform them in an instant, and use it to broadcast the message I don't understand this, so it follows that nobody else does either.

From this, I would observe that there appears to be some authority that ignorance provides, to which many want to appeal to, with benefits that many wish to claim.

Next we get into the really hot stuff. The philosopher reveals he actually is furnished with least a rudimentary sense of some part of the answer—snow melt and springs fed by underground lakes being key parts of the water cycle—yet he brings these answers up not to consider them, but to preemptively remove them entirely from the equation of potential answers. These actually are the answers, but the philosopher rejects them out of hand, with an rationale that doesn't even attempt to progress past come on, give me a break. It's this aspect of the philosophy that really starts to fascinate; the way the philosopher claims to be curious while demonstrating himself actively incurious, the way he anticipates and seals himself off from the answers he claims to seek, the way he uses his lack of knowledge not to pursue knowledge, but to shut down knowledge or even the chance that knowledge exists; the way that, when faced with waterfalls, he hews so unerringly to the edicts of those great moral teachers of the 1990s, TLC.

Again, the goal here does not seem to be knowing, but not-knowing, as a way of claiming the authority of ignorance.

But here comes the real knock-out punch for me: the way that our philosopher king of the burrito establishes skepticism for a waterfall while standing in front of a waterfall. A waterfall or a river can be mysterious, as can a mountain, as can our view of the cosmos, as can a tiny garden ant. Yet there it is all the same—it exists. I can understand curiosity or awe in the face of such things; I can even share that curiosity, that awe. What sends me running into the next room with an itchy brain is the common instinct to demonstrate one's skepticism of a thing in the face of that thing. To encounter something as beautiful as a waterfall and to respond nice try, but you don't fool me. To position yourself as the arbiter of a reality that is right in front of you, and to reject that reality simply because you don't get it, to infer that the vast sea of human knowledge on the topic is nothing next to the thimble of your ignorant skepticism, to demand that the giants of human awareness who have come before you and upon whose shoulders you are invited to stand must instead stand on your shoulders, and if you cannot bear the weight, or if this does not afford you a better view than you had before, then this is proof not of your failure, but of theirs.

Reality is doing water wrong, says the guy whose profession is telling you you're doing salad wrong. He appeals to no authority but his own ignorance to make that claim—which is interesting, because he actually has an area of expertise that he defends rather vociferously. If he told you you were fucking doing salad fucking wrong, and you told him that actually you don't believe in fucking salad, because fucking lettuce makes you skeptical (it just grows, nice and clean like that? out of the ground? come on), he'd likely refute you based on knowledge he's spent his life acquiring—and he would be correct to do so. When faced with a waterfall, though, he takes a skeptical posture, not because of curiosity or knowledge, but because come on already.

And I think to myself: skeptical to what end? Flat-earthers might at least be forgiven to some degree for their wrongheaded instinct (if not for their insistence on remaining within their ignorance despite any proof) since our low vantage point doesn't immediately suggest a spherical planet. But what is our philosopher going to do with this skepticism, become a ... waterfall denier?

Perhaps so. Or perhaps there's nothing more to it than a general posture toward knowledge and ignorance, nothing more to it than a desire for the easy gains to be derived from an ignorant posture. He doesn't say so, but our philosopher almost seems as though he believes that he has found The Matrix—proof that we are in a simulation. Many people do believe this, and believe they have discovered evidence for some instance or another where reality has broken down, offering their ignorance as evidence. Now there are very smart people who believe that we might be in a simulation, which is how this idea first got passed into general currency, but these smart people stand at the end of a long line of accumulated human knowledge, exploring a vastness so large that it cannot be easily imagined without resorting to metaphor, or gazing at building blocks of reality so tiny that human imagination fails. It is here, at the very edge of our ability to perceive, that we find places where reality appears to break down, and start to find metaphors to talk about it, like computer simulations.

Our waterfall skeptic, on the other hand, believes that the whole thing breaks down at the level of water traveling in channels, mostly because when it is explained to him, he looks at the explanation and says nuh-uh. His skepticism in the face of observable reality has in his eyes bestowed upon him an authority greater than our greatest combined minds—a pretty good thing to be able to claim, for no more work than simply not knowing about something.

You might well ask: So what? Why does this matter? Why make such a big deal about a professional or even semi-professional foodie shout-guy who happened to cross your algorithm?

It's a fair question. I don't know much else about Hamendani. I suppose he might even be engaging in a bit of spontaneous satire that is undifferentiable from the thing it skewers. And it's possible that after posting his video Hamendani actually was curious and went on to find the answers. But his video struck me as emblematic of a certain popular way of being a human being that the internet seems to have, if not unlocked entirely, at least managed to added a new permutation: the use of ignorance to establish oneself as a greater authority than the expert.

The world is full of philosophers of ignorance, as I believe I mentioned, and this is a problem, because we've been having more and more trouble establishing a shared reality even though we have never had a better handle on reality. Also, there's this: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is currently trying very hard to kill us all, or at least to kill a lot of us, and this is a big problem, because he is no longer just a nepo-baby failson made out of aligator leather; he has gone gotten himself appointed the head of our federal Department of Health and Human Services as part of our current fascist administration.

And recently Kennedy went on Tucker Carlson's show, which is already a bad start if you know anything about that guy. Tucker's sort of a hybrid shout-guy and sarcasm-guy who positions himself as a truth teller in order to tell lies on his very popular propaganda program. Carlson's topic is mostly Nazi propaganda, in much the same way that Hamendani's is cooking. Anyhow, while he was on Carlson's show, Kennedy said this:

We have to stop "trusting the experts"—right? We were told at the beginning of Covid, don't look at any data yourself, don't do any investigation yourself, just trust the experts, and trusting the experts is not a feature of science, it's not a feature of democracy. It's a feature of religion and it's a feature of totalitarianism. In democracy we have the obligation—and it's one of the burdens of citizenship—to do our own research and make our own determinations.

So this man who is committed to demolishing public health and scientific research on behalf of a totalitarian regime that is committed to demolishing democracy is doing so in the name of public health and science and democracy, and he's positioning himself against expertise and the accumulation of our inherited human knowledge in the name of open-mindedness and curiosity and knowledge. He's positioning whatever he personally is willing to accept about a topic in which he is not trained as superior to the sum total of human knowledge from those who have studied the matter deeply enough to actually expand the limits of human understanding on the topic.

He's able to do this because he appeals to the authority of his own ignorance, and millions of people who have access to answers to all their questions nevertheless prefer ignorance.

Today I'm thinking about why.

So let's take RFK Jr. up on the challenge, and think about religion and science, and democracy and totalitarianism, and curiosity and knowledge, and incuriosity and ignorance, and about metaphor-challenged people such as himself, and the profound arrogance they display.

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I should probably explain RFK Jr. a bit more.

RFK Jr is probably one of the most successful shout-guys we've ever had, depending on how you want to count success. Kennedy has managed to shout so much that he sort of shouted himself into being a whisper-guy, and nowadays the voice of American health sounds like rotgut whiskey filtered through a bucket of acid-soaked rusty nails. Kennedy's topic is public health (much like Hamendani's is cooking and Carlson's is Nazi propaganda), and he works for the undisputed A-1 most successful shout-guy of all time: A meat clown in a blue suit whose shout-topic was business deals, a guy so good at shouting he managed to shout himself into the presidency of the United States not once but twice. Kennedy's boss is so good at being a shout-guy he actually didn't ever have to know anything at all about how business deals work, or really anything about how anything works; he's just had to shout and not pay his bills his whole life and lie about it, and everything has worked out just fine for him over the last 80 years of American history.

Anyway, there are two main things Kennedy says he wants: 1) to make America healthy again and 2) to let disease ravage through our populations, killing off the sick and weak.

You might be forgiven for believing that that these two goals are at cross-purposes. I sure think that. And you might be skeptical that he truly is motivated by the first one, since he pursues it mostly by pushing debunked conspiracy hokum, and ignoring professional national and global associations of experts who hold much of the accumulation of human knowledge on the subject, and dismantling the institutions and constructs that maintain and promote and foster public health and research disease and epidemiology, and by firing knowledgeable people and replacing them with quacks, and by cutting off access to vital remedies, medicines, and vaccines.

None of this is aligned with health. But it is aligned with the other thing he says he wants, which is killing off the weak. If you wanted to kill a whole lot of already vulnerable people (as he has before, in American Samoa), if your belief is that the answer to public health is to only let the healthy live, and if you were trying to kill a whole bunch of people in order to effect that, then you would do what RFK Jr. is doing.

And it's all activated by the authority of ignorance.

This brings me back to waterfalls, and those who do or don't go chasing them.

Those who want answers to questions go seeking them by learning from those who know, and by observing, and testing, and sharing what they've learned. In so doing you know they are committed to learning. Those who want to maintain their ignorance about those questions start with their conclusions, and find the answers that support them, then refuse to acknowledge when these proofs are debunked, and refuse to accept that there could be greater knowledge than the knowledge they personally accept, and use their skepticism and ignorance as proof that not only is the knowledge not possible, but that knowledge categorically does not exist. In so doing, you know they are committed to ignorance.

If you are a human being who has never seen a river, I reckon a river's going to blow your mind. You might decide to make a story about a river god that can hold your sense of wonder about what an amazing thing you can see a river is, and to explain how such a thing might come to be; about where all the water comes from, and why it dries up if it does. If you are a human being who has come up with a story about the river god, you might tell that story on to your family and friends, too, and to your children, and, if it is a good story that is useful for expressing the inexpressible, then they might pass it down to their children, and they to theirs. There's something powerful here, is what the story is saying, there is more to it than we know. If it's a good story, it will point out to the mystery, not inward on itself.

Or maybe you are less a mystic and more a curious type; you might follow the river to the source, observe, perform and replicate tests. You might learn about springs, you might hypothesize vast underwater seas, and you might even prove it by digging wells. You might make note of snowfall and rainfall, and start to realize that, contra the great philosopher Hamendani, there actually are oceans at the tops of mountains, and they are called "clouds," or "the atmosphere." And, once you have these answers, you might be thrilled by the new knowledge, and eager to add it to the general pool of accumulated and inherited human knowledge, sharing it with your family and friends, and passing these lessons down to your children, and, if your discoveries are replicable and remain useful, they'll pass them down to their children, and the explanations help shape the stories, even as the stories point to greater mysterious, out into the void, where human knowledge hasn't yet reached.

While most might understand that the stories exists as a useful way to express the inexpressible, others, not given to metaphor, might start to believe that point of the story is not to express the inexpressible, but rather to constrain it; to make sure that all human knowledge about rivers is trimmed away if it fails to fit the existing myth of the river god. In time, those who enforce the story as the sole arbiter of what is permitted to reality might even start to guard the dogmas of story against the encroachment of growing human knowledge. And some might decide that the accumulation of human knowledge has gone too far, that human knowledge has reached its edge, and that none should question the received knowledge of this expertise. Thus even scientific inquiry can fall victim to the human impulse to convert metaphor to dogma.

Skepticism comes in handy here. If you are a curious person, you'll be skeptical of dogmas that end with because that's what the story says, and those unwilling to look beyond. And so many of those who have added most to human knowledge are those who have cultivated deep skepticism to existing dogmas. These are people who understand that metaphor has its place, but metaphor is not reality.

But there are those metaphor-challenged people who act as if skepticism is all that is needed to acquire knowledge, which allows them to circumvent the requirement to learn by simply demanding the right to ignore truth. If all you need to become the leading expert in a field is a general skepticism, if all that is required to be an expert is the acquisition only of information you are willing to accept, then no work is required, no price need be paid. In minutes you too can claim to have cracked the matrix, solved epidemiology, become an expert in judo, simply by stating your skepticism that the reality where all these things occur is actually real.

There is a profound curiosity and humility that leads a person to seek answers to questions, admitting that there are things you don't know, to acknowledging the a reliance upon experts, upon an inherited collective understanding, because reality is something too vast for a single human mind to hold. Curiosity, because it truly seeks the answer. Humility, because it recognizes and accepts its own limitations.

And there is profound arrogance and laziness that leads somebody to decide that research begins and ends with them, that individual cursory study is greater than the totality of study that has come before it, that if somebody doesn't know something then there is nothing more to be known. Arrogance, because it positions themself as the apex of human knowledge. Laziness, because it doesn't even bother to start the work of acquiring knowledge in order to make the claim.

So it makes perfect sense that fascism and colonialism and billionairism would oppose the collective accumulation of human knowledge, because to accept it is to admits the collective nature of human society, and fascism and colonialsm billionairism see human society and all the humans in it as something to dominate and own, and if humans will not agree to be dominated, if they resist being used as property, then they must be punished or killed. Shared reality interferes with that, which is why fascism and colonialism and billionairism always seek to destroy it.

It used to be that if somebody figured things out, it took its time getting around the world and sometimes it never did, or it developed simultaneously in different places, in different ways. A lot of deep knowledge was never captured in formal recordings. A lot of deep human knowledge has probably been lost in this way, as colonialists and billionairists and proto-fascists moved around the planet, murdering whole populations of people deemed ignorant by the invaders on no authority beyond the authority of the invaders' own ignorance, mass-murderers who believed that no knowledge could exist outside of their own knowledge, who believed that nothing could be lost in the killing if those killed could be deemed savage. It seems almost axiomatic that the genocides of native populations in the continents dubbed "America" represent the burning of the Great Library at Alexandria, dozens or hundreds of times over. What was lost? Not nothing, that's for sure. Has it all been regained? Hard to think it has.

That's the sort of demolition that RFK Jr. and the rest of his fascists would like to enact again, by appealing to the authority of their ignorance—an ignorance that is preferred to knowledge, which makes it a chosen ignorance.

If not-knowing can make you an expert, then you don't have to work. If skepticism about reality qualifies you to define reality for everyone, then you get to be one of the special ones who have figured out the matrix, instead of one of the Non Player Characters, the ones who don't matter.

These days human knowledge goes everywhere in a heartbeat. Technology has become a vector of collective human knowledge and collective human delusions, too. It's never been easier to know the answer, but people still choose to not know instead. Yes. They choose.

That's what I want to give you today, is the right way to think and talk about chosen ignorance. People who for whatever reason would rather not do the work of learning or acknowledge the humbling limits of their own ability instead deliberately seek out ignorance in order to achieve the easy gains the authority of ignorance bestows. They choose the arrogance of not having to improve. They choose the laziness of not having to do the work.

This, then, is the reframe.

You don't listen to experts? You throw out the inherited sum collective of human knowledge? I would hope to never be that arrogant.

You just use your own research? I would hope to never be that lazy.

You think that the fact that you don't know means nobody does? I would hope to never be that close-minded.

You not believing it doesn't make it true. You not understanding it doesn't mean it isn't understood. Your ignorance give you no authority. Your skepticism doesn't make you wise.

Stay in the matrix of your own ignorance if you want; live in your fever dream of superiority with your coterie of proudly ignorant friends; live in a simplified illusion where you already have it all figured out, which gives you an illusion of knowledge and safety even while you're being consumed by those who made the illusion for you.

The rest of us are out here fighting the good fight in the real world, where there will never stop being more to learn.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. All he can be is sorry, and that is all he is.