Where the personal becomes the political in our unquenchable thirst for knowledge…
- Comment #102
On its face, the sheer magnitude of the meaning behind such words is staggering and frightening in its implications – that knowledge is something we should fear, and that knowledge could somehow be considered dangerous to us and our lives.
There is a real and tangible difference between information and knowledge; with the latter suggesting an understanding and comprehension of the former.
Knowledge is how we use information – and among considered minds of equally considered people, our pursuit of knowledge should be our highest ideal; that we should always be willing to challenge ourselves and our beliefs with new and ever evolving information so that we may also increase our understanding and therefore our own knowledge.
But not everyone sees things this way – and for some, particularly those who would seek to control the flow of information to serve their own interests… people having knowledge is the scariest thing in the world to them – because people who are in personal possession of knowledge are much less willing to cede control of their lives to others; be that control given to another person or an institution or government, and such educated and informed individuals are a threat to those who would seek to hold power over others simply by controlling just how much information any one person is allowed to have.
Last week when I first wrote about the situation surrounding Jill McDevitt here; I didn’t adequately measure the depths of the waters which I had waded into – tho I do indeed recognize that any conversation surrounding sex and religion is often provocative and somewhat edgy, but I also think that tends to be in line with much of what I write about anyway, and is very much in line with who I am as a woman. I crave exploring the outer edges and coloring outside the lines – for this has always been where I have discovered the things in this universe which lead me to a state of “knowledge” — we only learn by being willing to accept what we don’t know or understand, and we never learn by simply accepting information without questioning.
Tho to some degree — ‘faith’ requires us to suspend our quest for more; even as we may seek to increase our understanding and knowledge of our faith by immersing ourselves with information – faith itself requires a different kind of commitment to knowledge. We make that leap of faith in the hopes that one day we will reach an enlightened place of knowledge; either thru death and afterlife or perhaps by way of an epiphany or reaching a transcendent place of spirituality thru meditation.
That’s the thing about faith – you don’t really know what’s on the other side until you get there.
But what happens when faith becomes perverted by the human lust for power and control?
A personal bête noire for me is organized religion – because I see such institutional herding of those who have faith as something completely serving the needs of those who seek to hold power over the faithful. Faith does not require religion to exist, yet religion does not exist without faith.
I’ve asked a very simple fundamental question throughout all of this discussion about sex, religion, politics, and thru the associated splinters of conversations which have broken off from the branch – ‘why does anyone want to control what others do in the privacy of their own lives?’
In some ways my own understanding of the phenomenon, that is, the mechanics of how that control is established, perpetuated and functions has been increased, but my understanding of the motivations behind that are what I’ve really been questioning all along: and the only answer I’ve been able to glean from all of this discussion continually circles back to one word: control
What truly threatens the power of those who perceive themselves as being in control of others in that codependent relationship between leader and follower is knowledge itself. One must willingly surrender control to someone else — it cannot be taken or forced — be that to another person, an elected official, or a church, in order for that relationship to function.
But what struck me like a bucket of cold water splashing across my face was the sentence in italics above –
“Knowledge is a dangerous thing…”
Indeed it is. If your goal is to control others.
What began as a quirky musing on my part has become something so much larger than just my annoyed amusement towards people who get all worked up and hysterical over other people fucking in ways that they don’t like – it’s become an idea… and ideas are notoriously difficult to quash. Ideas take on a life of their own. They grow like seeds sown in the fields of our minds… simply waiting for the water of knowledge to make them grow. We feed these seeds with information and then one idea becomes two which becomes four which become eight… until these seedlings sprouting in our minds break thru the soil and reach for the nourishing light of expression… and in that moment, we cease to be the simple creatures of our birthright… we become everything our human potential promises us we can be – because we were not afraid of knowledge.
I have always found religious zealots to be sexual deviants behind closed doors. I have also found religious zealots to be some of the most unethical people to deal with in business.
They say one thing and do the opposite and never think a second about it. They skip all the parts about being a good person and jump right to the part about casting judgment on those whose beliefs differ.