Day 11: Knowledge is Power

I love to hear people that think they've got everything figured out. You can tell a lot about people by how much they think they know. Being around a college campus, there are plenty of kids that will saunter into a room and assume they are the smartest person there. There are kids that just got out of high school, that have not been out in the world or have but only for a year or two, and they are walking around the campus of any nearby college and thinking "My teacher is an idiot! I could teach that class." Well, I wrote that they were thinking that but the honest truth is most of them flat out say it.

I worry about people who build their selves up like that because the longer they go on in the delusion they live in, the harder it's going to hurt when it crashes down. The biggest problem is that when you only know a little bit, it seems like there's a lot that you know about one specific subject in comparison to your total amount of knowledge. The more that you learn and the more that you realize there is to know, the more you realize there is so much that you don't know. There's so much that nobody knows, that human minds can't even understand or comprehend yet. At a certain point, knowledge is terrifying.

Knowledge is power and power corrupts so knowing everything is absolute power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, the most evil being in the universe would be omnipotent and the most benevolent being would probably seem pretty stupid. I don't believe that transitive property works, though. I think that foolishness can be powerful, too, because with enough knowledge to seem like you know what you're doing, you can trick a lot of people into doing whatever you want. That's how scams work. However, a little more knowledge (or just basic empathy) could make the people in charge actually worth following.

I was originally going to just make fun of stupid college kids and stupid people who think they are so smart(unironically, I might add, which makes me a huge jackass) but I was just watching the vice presidential debates and now I'm really depressed because these guys have learned a lot of things and they can spout a lot of facts. They know a lot. I forgot, though, that knowledge does corrupt without the wisdom to use it properly and I just don't think that anybody who ends up in charge of things seems to have any wisdom.