On Ignorance

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement to make:

I, Robert Taylor Horne, am ignorant.

For the last decade of my life I have been increasingly convinced otherwise. I graduated high school with a 4.1 GPA. I aced the majority of my quizzes, tests, and exams. Everyone around me told me I was a genius. My success in school gave me the notion that I knew things, that I had a grasp on the world. My family was sure I would work for NASA when I got older.

The people were right that I was smart, the educational system was deceptive in giving me the notion that I knew things, and no one managed to teach me how to discern between intelligence and wisdom, something I as a young and intelligent man very much needed to know.

I’m not going to work for NASA (I simply have no desire to). Great intelligence comes with its own set of gifts and curses. I have an astounding capacity for self-deception which would be impossible if I was stupid. I have spent considerable time untying the knots of my own confusion.

Tens of thousands of hours of my life have been passed taking in secondhand information about the world I live in. True learning happens through direct experience, and secondhand information that isn’t sooner or later validated by direct experience is worthless. In some ways, I know very little about reality, the way one knows very little about the ocean upon entering its depths. Sure, there are gems that I discovered during my intellectual wanderings. There are models I came across which have truly aided me in navigating the complexity of this communal, cosmic existence; however, these models are not the thing they are modeled of. The map is not the territory. A grapefruit is a mystery until you’ve taken a bite.

Twenty-one years in, I have learned much. In many ways I am indeed wise, yet after two decades I am only beginning to learn that lifelong lesson, the one we so often struggle to learn: how to be a human being.