Last night I was treated to a wonderful experience at the Athens Planetarium, the home of philosophy and science, with an audio-visual buffet for the brain and senses.
It highlighted the ever expansive breadth and depth of human scientific knowledge into our cosmos and it sadly reminded me of a very depressing fact.
Human knowledge is mostly additive with occassional paradigm shifts and revisions but the masses always, unfortunately, lag far behind in the acceptance and acquisition of this ever increasing knowledge library.
In some cases, humans have had profound insight into our nature and that of the universe as well as sound principles and tenets in moral and political philosophy for thousands of years.
And still, a majority of our population continuously attempts to reinvent the wheel over and over again, relying only on flawed senses and intuition and their uncontrollable urge to appeal to subjective experience, anecdote, emotion, and supernatural wish thinking.
We live in a time where supernatural dogma still dominates the human psyche and long debunked anti-scientific beliefs continue to thrive and flourish. ,
One need only look at social media for a few hours to realize how much currency bad ideas like anti-evolution/creationism, anti-germ theory, anti-vaccination, flat earth, ancient aliens, and the appeal to nature fallacy still hold over our species.
So many people live their lives with a stone age moral and scientific philosophy while a tiny subset of our best and brightest continue to make discoveries and push us ever forward into space and into a more profound understanding of our biology and evolved psychology.
Imagine, for a moment, how our world would be if we could snap our fingers and wake up where 2x as many people were informed about and accepted all the things we already know.
Now, imagine if that number were increased tenfold or even represented the vast majority of our species.
We would, no doubt, be thousands of years into our future already and far more advanced.
Alas, the majority take hundreds and thousands of years to catch up and we must accept the realism of our relative snail's pace in making collective progress.
The consequence is not only the wasted opportunity cost as a species but is also a buffet for the brains and senses of every two-bit unscrupulous, reprobate grifter who would have it no other way, for this ignorance is their life's blood.
We seem doomed, to some extent, to have to make some of the same mistakes over and over again and to need to relearn things we've already come to know, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of years.
And our collective ignorance allows the worst of us to forever prey on the most gullible and least knowledgeable.