Ignorant? Let's Discuss

Our own Bob Davis led his response to last week's introduction with "we are all ignorant, just ignorant about different things." So well said and the perfect segue to our next session. Our discussion will be centered around Against Persuasion and its theme that the pursuit of knowledge requires a radical collaboration: the openness to being persuaded as much as an eagerness to persuade.

The genuine desire to know through honest inquiry, an aspiration of Member Monday, is certainly nothing new. Socrates sought to map out the terrain of his own ignorance through the dialogues with others, seeking clarification and refuting views, all in an attempt to acquire the knowledge he so desperately wanted. No interlocutor was off-limits as most people put forward claims. His ultimate high wire act must have been seeking to refute the proclamation by none other than the Oracle at Delphi that Socrates, himself, must be the wisest of men. 

We know all this, not because of anything Socrates himself wrote, but through Plato's life-long devotion to chronicling the dialogues. As we'd discussed in MM 5/4/20  View From Plato's Cave, Plato added his own take on truth and reality by means of allegory wherein each of us is trapped in a "cave" of misunderstanding such that what we perceive as truth is but the mere shadow of reality.

Socratic humility? We probed this trait in our MM 8/27/18 Get Over Thyself session with our suggestion back then that the "Know Thyself" sign over the entrance to the club library might someday be accompanied by "Get Over Thyself" over the exit. What a contrast to today's world seemingly inhabited by bloviating talking heads and politicians demagoguing the verities.

Perhaps the search for truth in future sessions might be framed in terms of a Hegelian dialectic where truth is discerned by means of thesis, antithesis, and from the resulting tension between the two might emerge synthesis. By way of example, our MM 8/9/21 Capitalism (II) session was framed:

Thesis: Continuation of the forces behind the growing disconnect between Wall Street and the real economy will eventually spark major inflation, invite monetary reset, undermine capitalism, and challenge the very idea of democracy itself; 

Antithesis: Modern Monetary Theory allows a sovereign sporting the world's reserve currency the freedom to expand its monetary base as needed given the Fed's other available tools to keep inflation in check.

We will endeavor to find future topics that are also well suited to be thus framed e.g. privacy/surveillance (recent Apple back door), 9/11 (Happy Anniversary), vaccination/masks. Please keep your own candidates in mind as we meet next week.