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The “Narrow Knowledge” Trap
Maslow’s Heirachy of Needs places “Safety” as one of our most fundamental needs. Humans can’t thrive or trust each other if our environment is unstable and unpredictable. This is especially problematic in our age were destablizing messages and experiences are all over both real life and our feeds and they are coming at so so fast and frequent that we cant predict the next blow to ir fragile inner world.
This builds in many people a prevaling feeling of shame — a haunting worthlessness based on loathing our weakness. Shame always asks “why” — “Why am i so weak?” That question is intoerable, so we often switch to “why is the world/life like this?”
There is a trap ready for the tortured soul right here: the “Narrow Knowledge” trap. In our longing to resolve our shame’s why, we will take an easy answer over complex truth: “there is some knowledge that i have just discovered that explains it all, but the rest of the world doesn’t know.” This is the allure of conspiracy theories and obscure and overly-exact doctrines. They give us the illusion of safety by making the world predicable again which feels almost as good as stability. At least i can explain why i’m issolated and at-risk, and that feels much better than the excruciating fragmentation of our times.
I know because i’ve fallen into this trap a few times and seen many that i care about snared by it.
bopbop2 Comments-
One of the complicating issues is how many real conspiracies there are — news about corrupt elites and deceitful and selfish corporations is revealed constantly. Likewise, we have lived through so many disruptive and revolutionary discoveries – the power secrets, of finding previously hidden knowledge, is very real.
Often the intuition upon which narrow knowledge is based is right in some spiritual sense, even though our emotions distort and fabricate the details. It’s important to acknowledge the innate being from which intuition springs and map out the underlying spiritual truth. Then emotions interwoven in the intuition must be processed by law and virtue till we can see the details of our context and act out God’s will and our true selves.
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In my limited knowledge (enough to make me dangerous) of Neuroscience, the question of “why” is a dangerous question. The reason is that we can’t always find the why, so in our minds we have to make up a why. Better questions might be what, where, when, and how. These question allow us to gather data and be able to better understand what is happening, or has happened without having to place guilt and shame. They allow us to learn from previous mistakes, either our own or the mistakes of others without the shame aspect. Understanding the data without the sham aspect allows us to make better, more informed decisions.
Another danger of the “why” question is that it may require us to judge the motives of others. While it may seem obvious to us what motivated another persons actions, we don’t really know what goes on in their mind.
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