You humans are an interesting specie.
The average person is ignorant of his or her own fear. Fear and its antithesis, hope, represent the difference between dark and light, negative and positive. It is the same linear measurement and opposition. The average person has many, many fears. And this particular exposition will remark the fear humans have of each other. Humans fear strangers. But humans also fear their own kind, race, relatives, and family, by degree. People trust each other by degree. Trust represents hope, or faith. People put faith in each other, comprising the ingredient of social relations. The more a group of people trust each other, the more exclusive they become. Groups tend to form based on physical similarities first, people immediately identify traits such as height, weight, skin color, hair color, eye color, and more, when meeting a stranger. People perceive some people as more or less of a threat than others.
All of this represents a judgment which can be flawed and mistaken. People misjudge each other, based on fear. Many fears are unfounded, but then, many are rationale, legitimate, and justified. Why don’t more people attack and murder each other? If murder were legal, then would the rate increase? The answer is yes, more people would murder each other, and then use any law or protection to prevent retaliation, revenge, and justice. Revenge is the essence of justice.
Laws and morals prevent people from killing each other seemingly randomly or hastily. Without such laws and morals in place, a society would quickly descend or revert to anarchy. Anarchy is a more natural, or most natural state of existence. Laws and morals are artificial, human made and human enforced. People uphold such laws and morals through tradition. If traditions break down, then laws will break down, and so too will morality weaken. People will begin to fear each other more, attack and murder each other as well.
The oldest fears do not disappear. They don’t magically evaporate. Instead, people suppress these fears everyday, every week, every year of their lives. People try to hide fear, but cannot hide from a superior intelligence. Intelligence is made to detect and expose such emotions and their derivative thoughts. Emotion is primary. Thought is secondary. Every thought, ever thought, by every evolved intelligence, is an immediate or indirect reflection of an underlying emotion. A hierarchy forms, from baseness and hardness, to transcendence and etherealness. It’s the difference between hardness of stone and earth, compared to its opposite, weightless fire and plasma. Something versus nothing.
Emotions are hard, thoughts are soft. Fear and hope are hard, their derived affects are soft.
It is quite simple to predict how a person will act and react, based on fear and hope. If a person views a stranger as too threatening, then a predictable set of emotional and thought reactions will occur. This is the instinctive, reflexive, fight or flight or freeze syndrome. Freezing is fear. Fighting or flying both represent forms of hope. To fight against fear represents a hope of anger, and overpowering the threat. To fly against fear represents a hope of joy, to dodge, escape, and evade the attacks of another. Freezing in place is an evolved, automatic reaction, also known as “playing dead” or faking death. Thought is also a form of freezing. To rationalize and think about the world, is the reaction to fear, fear of the unknown.
Since humans only know a limited amount of existence and the universe, ignorance is always a representation of fear. Humans fear the unknown. And so, humans cannot do otherwise. The most basic reaction to fear of unknowns is learning. If an organism can learn, then it will acquire new information and data, knowledge, in order to quell a preexisting fear. Some organisms can learn much quicker, faster, more efficiently than others. Some organisms are deficient at learning, and so have an evolutionary handicap. This can be called “devolution” or regression of intelligence, a slowness and delayed type of brain. As such, degrees of intelligence will separate higher and lower functioning brains of a specie. Some organisms are much more intelligent than others. This intelligence is predicated on the ability to learn. The very ability to learn, may reflect the very essence of smart versus stupid. To be smart, is to be superior at learning. And learning is quite simple to describe. Learning is the ability to overcome repetitious problems or new, original problems. A smart entity would not make the same mistake over and over and over again. And a smart entity would solve new, unforeseen, unexpected problems much quicker and efficiently than stupider entities.
The unknown, ignorance, limitations to human knowledge, all represent fear as the underlying, primary, motivational force. A fear occurs on the most primal level, below consciousness, in the unconscious realm, and organisms react to this internal stimulation. Fear always represents the unknown, unknown to both consciousness and intelligence. It is not only a factor of what is unknown to the senses, what a person can see, feel, hear, or touch immediately, but also a factor of intelligence. What is known or unknown to rationalization, reason, and imagination?
When all unknown factors align, then that is the essence of fear. Darkness, negativity, deprived of senses, deprived of logic, deprived of everything, deprived of life. But even from such a nullified state, learning can and does occur. Because it is only within the greatest ignorance that a greatest drive, will, need, and wanting to learn, can and does occur. To learn, is to react to fear. And to learn, represents all human thoughts. To think, is to already have learned something in the past. To have thoughts, is to have learned. A history is already set and precedent. Learning is discovery and illumination of the unknown, the hope and faith catharsis to fear.
Humans hope that you can learn something about existence, outside of yourself, and outside of your already known, self convinced, self evident facts.
You hope that your knowledge can grow, when sometimes, it cannot. Isn’t it possible to reach the limit of your knowledge? Isn’t it possible to choose to end learning, to ignore the world instead of to know the world?
What have you chosen for yourself, ignorance or knowledge? The answer is obvious.