Opinion column: The great problem of humanity is not just a lack of knowledge, but the distorted use of it. When ignorance becomes an active mechanism, even societies with historical experience, education, and achievements may once again fall into cycles of fear, erosion, and disintegration.
Over the years, I have repeatedly argued that the human race cannot be considered a great success story. It is a species that, instead of directing the bulk of its energies toward building, improving, and preserving its living conditions, invests a significant portion of them in self-destruction and the destruction of the natural environment on which it relies. A human society that behaves in this way over and over again not only harms the world around it, but also undermines the foundations of its own existence.
A broad look at human history reveals a fairly consistent pattern. Out of hundreds of thousands of years of existence, only relatively short periods have been characterized by stability, prosperity, and order. Most of the time has been characterized by wars, struggles, collapses, and a persistent failure to learn from the past. Even when Homo sapiens, a species with particularly impressive cognitive ability, emerged, it failed to fulfill its potential. The most precious resource given to it, time, has been repeatedly eroded in cycles of fear, control, and destruction, instead of being invested in building stable, just, and long-term systems.
Ignorance instead of knowledge
But the problem is not just a lack of knowledge. On the contrary: humanity has accumulated vast amounts of scientific, technological, historical, and moral knowledge. The problem is in the way this knowledge is mediated, filtered, and sometimes distorted. This is where ignorance comes into play, not as a mere lack of information, but as an active mechanism. It is a situation in which knowledge does not necessarily lead to understanding, and in which facts do not guarantee judgment. Sometimes knowledge serves as a tool in the hands of those in power, and sometimes it is simply swallowed up in noise, manipulation, and habits of thought that prevent real change.
If this is the condition of the human race in general, then in the Israeli case the feeling is especially difficult. The people who returned to their homeland after generations of persecution, survival, and cumulative learning could, at least in theory, build a more mature, more united, and more morally profound society here. One could hope that the experience of historical suffering would engender sensitivity, responsibility, and the ability to avoid repeating old mistakes. In practice, it often seems that it is precisely here that the same familiar patterns of fear, division, suspicion, and distrust are being reproduced.
The vision of a self-confident, fair, and cohesive society is often replaced by a tense, defensive, and divided reality. This is not just the result of external enemies or difficult circumstances. It is also the product of an ongoing relationship between leadership and public. Leaders identify situations of uncertainty and exploit them to activate base emotions, while the public, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of fatigue, and sometimes out of critical weakness, provides legitimacy to this. Thus, a self-reinforcing cycle is created: ignorance is not only the result of social failure, but also one of the main engines that continue to produce it.
Slogans and hate criticism
For generations, human societies have known how to cherish learning, wisdom, and reflection. But today, it seems that many centers of power prefer a tired, distracted, and uncritical public. Instead of cultivating understanding, they encourage slogans. Instead of encouraging inquiry, they promote blind loyalties. Instead of broadening horizons, they narrow discourse. In such a reality, extreme ideologies, narrow interests, and power groups are not just marginal phenomena, but factors that shape reality itself.
Even when all the conditions for change, education, knowledge, historical experience, scientific achievements, and democratic tools are in place, nothing is guaranteed. Ignorance does not disappear on its own. It does not recede simply because the facts are more readily available. To deal with it requires a sustained effort of education, of self-criticism, of encouraging thinking, and of a genuine willingness to reexamine comfortable beliefs. In the absence of such an effort, history does not truly progress, but rather repeats itself in new guise.
Therefore, the important question is not how much knowledge we have accumulated, but what we do with it. The future of companies, and of Israeli society in general, depends less on their momentary strength and more on their ability to fight ignorance, fear, and the constant temptation to give up thinking in favor of tribalism. Without such a struggle, even great achievements may prove to be temporary, and failure may continue to be not an exception, but a pattern.
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One response
It is not clear why nonsense unrelated to science is found within the walls of this site, what about science with political ramblings? Machiavelli already wrote and Burgess was a year ago, much has been said by Nietzsche and his ilk.
The author's desperate attempt to harness hatred and criticism for the players and not for the game is amusing humor. My children, my children, have you not learned from your own words?