(revised on Medium) On the expression "to know better" (series: notes to myself)

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There are people who think they know better, and those who know better than to convince them that they don't. I now belong to the second group, but I regularly meet many members of the first: confident, opinionated, patronising. I know them well. For I was one of them. Their beliefs are not improvable, because they are perfect in their views and unfixable in mine. They don't simply know what the case is. They know better than anyone else what the case really is. And they will tell you, even if you don't ask.

Assuming you are not too obtuse, life teaches you the hard way to enrol in the other group, of those who should have known better and now know better than to engage. Mistake after mistake - even if you re-arrange facts with a Herculean effort, even if you resist the pressure of mounting evidence, no matter how self-self-preserving your attitude is (yes, it is the self-preserving nature of the self) - sooner or later should teach you some humbleness. Hammer it home, you the reluctant rod that would rather not bend, but shall.

The certainties have not vanished, but they have become rounder, softer, kinder, more like piles of cushions in your mind than steel scaffolding. The rational irritations still rasp, but less sharply, and more seldom. The urgency to reply is a more resistible temptation, often overcome. You have discovered that mistakes can be left alone, errors do not need to be rectified, irrationalities can be disregarded and nothing happens. Not because you don't know better what the case is. Or at least not because you no longer think that you know better. That vice is still there. After all, you were one of them. But because you increasingly know better than to engage in pointless discussions.

There was a sense of victory and satisfaction in driving home a point, in forcing someone to change their minds, in proving that you were right and they wrong, in seeking admiration for your arguing skills. But the other is now humiliated, resentful, offended. He cared about his opinions and had to abandon them, or admit he should, or pretend he would. A small act of violence, with little value to show. Even assuming the arguments had any effect. For they usually don't. Because if they did, then the fool whose mind you are trying to change would not hold the opinions he does in the first place.

You wish this knowing better were a sign of wisdom, or maturity, or at least some hard-earned toleration. A matter of moral improvement. Ethics teaching a lesson to Logic. But you know better than to fool yourself. This knowing better of yours looks more like tiredness, because arguing takes too much energy now. Or maybe stinginess, for your time is shorter and way more precious, and you feel you cannot waste it in meaningless debates. Or probably just indifference, because maybe you don't care anymore whether someone will have their way. They are welcome to crush against the wall of facts and truths. It is their skulls, not yours.

Or maybe, just maybe, could it be a bit of open-mindedness? A touch of patience, which is not tolerance, but a close friend of hers? Maybe you just want to be better than you are, less eager to prove people wrong, less earnest to put things right. Less unbearable. More accommodating. Less confrontational. More amicable. Perhaps.

Or maybe it's just age, and that sense of selfish preservation that comes with the extra years. For at the end of the day, wrong opinions can be avoided, idiocies ignored, falsities disregarded, dogmas left to others, unreasonable doubts brushed off, and ungranted certainties rejected. You don't have to convince anybody. You can simply walk away.

To know better than to engage is also to know better than to waste your shrinking time, while searching for truths. It is only distracting, the fools won't change, but you will have lost your path and a chance to attend one more lecture in Nature's classroom. You better know better than that.

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"Notes to myself" is available as a little book on Amazon:
- ebook shorturl.at/crV09
- paperback: shorturl.at/ahvxY

Comments

  1. AnonymousMon Sept 19, 02:24:00 pm

    Hoping not misunderstood this note, it feels a bit like a surrendering to insofference for the inability of the confident, opinionated, patronising "know better" minds. I hope you'll never apply this on your incredible work of divulgation of something that is too much locked up in the ivory and sometimes dusty rooms of academy.
    Besides them, lot of people needs to know, reflect and comprehend this new reality.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MailMaster C.Fri Sept 23, 01:31:00 pm

    I had the same thought, now I might be wrong, but I estimate that prof. Floridi is going to change his approach to some kind of people, not to the whole task of divulgate his knowledge and good ideas.
    I hope it, anyway. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Luciano FloridiSat Oct 22, 06:16:00 pm

      it just that sometimes one feels that reason is taking too long to prevail :-)

      Delete

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