The Greatest Enemy of Knowledge is not Ignorance; it is the illusion of Knowledge

A debatable philosophical topic, if viewed from either way is valid based on the perception of that particular person. When one talks about philosophy, nothing is correct or wrong. People tend to find comfort in things they are familiar with; uncertainty deems them to find various ways to minimize their fundamental discomfort, which gives rise to individualistic perceptual opinions.

Knowledge is something that is not physically quantifiable and hence impossible to scale it by any degree of measurement. Absence of understanding leads to ignorance. People tend to ignore things that are unknown to them and hence deliberately debates to prove it false by any means necessary. Take the example of a child and an illiterate person. A child typically cries over anything that irritates them or things they desperately want, without any consent of their parent’s suffering. Now, the question that arises is that the unintentional ignorance showed by the child a threat to knowledge; funny how the same ignorance is the ladder to a vast source of knowledge that the child will eventually learn at a rapid rate. That inability of a child to perceive a situation rationally and infer a preferable reaction is the inability to understand it at a higher level. The tendency of an adolescence to ignore something and bend it in their own favor to depict oneself as correct gives the idea of a very complex attributional behavior known as conservatism. People that fall within this category are close-minded and not open to new ideas. They tend to avoid or disprove knowledge regarding things that questions their belief, custom and falsifies them.

Certain people on the other hand tend to procrastinate on things they barely have any idea about; their knowledge is hall-full. People like these tend to fortify their beliefs on others stating them as correct. For example, ancient philosophers used to think that the Earth was flat. They thought they were correct and revoked other ideas. Socrates died because of the very same reason. The inability to reach to the truth leads to such notion and perception of people. Back in the 1900s, Einstein tried to unify electromagnetic force and gravitational force via a single equation that would answer every question about how the universe came into existence. However, introduction of quantum mechanics disproved Einstein’s hypothesis; Einstein, unwilling to accept lead to his own devastation.

Concluding, I would like to say that anyone who is unwilling to change, be it ignorance or unwillingness to learn is the enemy of knowledge. Knowledge grows by sharing, accepting and analyzing ideas, facts and thoughts. Anyone who is unwilling to change or adapt can be deemed as an enemy of knowledge and society as a whole.