The Rise Of Surety

I’m sick of surety.

There is generally only one form of surety available to the consumer of information. That is the surety of self-enforced ignorance. I’ll explain.

I need to know things, and I want to know things. People who are going to report things to me have a profound duty, almost always shirked. I can only find out things from most people and institutions around the edges, exposed — or perhaps betrayed is a better word –unintentionally. To be an intellectual is to be a skeptic who is willing to listen. It’s a waste of time, mostly, now. No one’s going to tell you much of anything.

Many talk and write all the time. The most tedious people talk like they are writing at you aloud. Bloggers have a tendency to do this if they meet anywhere. Show me a picture of your children, you housebound agoraphobes. It’s the only thing you have I can be sure you know much of anything about, that I don’t. Unlike whatever half-remembered lesson from a fool you’re half-remembering again and hurling down on the listener’s ear from your intellectual dunghill Olympus, your children might be interesting –if they have the innate sense to run away from home.

Ignorance begets speculation. But ignorance, self-imposed mostly, is being transmogrified directly into obdurate surety without the intermediate step of true speculation. True speculation involves saying “I don’t know,” prepared to hear the truth, if available. Few will admit that they don’t know much about any particular thing, because they think it leaves an opening for their enemies, who being bad people unlike you will never admit ignorance; but at the bottom of it everyone’s simply afraid to be presented with facts that would make them uncomfortable. That’s why all they’ll acknowledge they don’t know –if anything — is how their personal bete noires managed to wreck the particular wreckage at hand, or how exactly their Dear Leader managed to arrange good weather for them on the day of their picnic. In this world, never allowing anyone else to get a word in edgewise is the Eleventh Commandment that trumps the other ten stitched together.

There are very few people who said “I wonder what happened to that plane that disappeared without a trace” yesterday, and left it at that. They immediately began to speculate, as humans do, but in the new, adamantine method. They rearranged their prejudices, born, weaned, and brought to manhood by rigid talk-to-the hand disinterest in others’ opinions and objective reality, to fit the topic, as they would fit every topic.

The Drudge Report keeps a list of cable “Chat (yelling) About News Shows.” Apparently even this thin intellectual gruel is a kind of bloodsport horserace, too, like so many things. I have never seen one minute of any one of those shows, and I don’t think I’m missing much. That which is useless is boring or infuriating, to taste, in these matters. I could learn more in five minutes of How It’s Made than if I watched a century of people yelling things at one another wearing pancake makeup. And I already know how it’s made.

I dare you to tell me something I don’t know. Telling me something you don’t know but are absolutely sure of is of supremely doubtful utility.