By Jim
“Gymbeaux” Brown, December 6, 2024
It has been said that Gary Keller, co-founder of Keller Williams Realty International, has said, “You are either IGNORANCE based or you are LEARNING (knowledge) based!” If he did say that, he was right then and even more so today! Just like being positive, you either consciously or unconsciously make a decision every morning when you first wake up, to be so! Today is either going to be positive or negative and I will act accordingly. AND, you will choose to be and remain ignorant or you will choose to be learning based - TODAY! In both cases, my advice to everyone would be to CHOOSE WISELY! And…it wouldn’t hurt to put notes on your bathroom mirror (assuming you look in the mirror every morning when you brush your teeth, you do brush your teeth, right?) and the notes would remind you that for TODAY, I CHOOSE TO BE POSITIVE AND I CHOOSE TO BE LEARNING BASED!
With that said, I looked up
“ignorance” and “learning”, this is what I discovered on the Internet:
Ignorance
- “Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night
without moon or star.” - Confucius
- “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than
sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” - Martin Luther
King Jr.
- “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject
something you don’t know anything about.” - Alfred North Whitehead
- “Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the
vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.” -
Horace Mann
- “It is not good to try to stop knowledge from
going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.” - Frank Zappa
Learning
- “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a
people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the
power which knowledge gives.” - Thomas Paine
- “The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a
knowledge of our own ignorance.” - Robert Burton
- “Education is a progressive discovery of our own
ignorance.” - William Wordsworth
- “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not
ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.” - Daniel J. Boorstin
- “Learning is the only thing the mind never
exhausts, never fears, and never has doubts about.” – Socrates
Of all the above quotes
besides the one attributed to Gary Keller, my favorite quote is #2 from Martin
Luther King, Jr. “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere
ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
I have underlined the
key words in the King quote to draw emphasis to the fact that people CHOOSE
“conscientious stupidity!” In other
words, people CHOOSE to be STUPID! How does one become learning based as
compared to learning to be ignorant based?
If you believe that attending school makes you smart, I can show you a
lot of people who have non-medical Doctor’s Degrees who show significant signs
of stupidity because they have learned WHAT THEY WERE TAUGHT TO LEARN in
our universities. It is not just my
opinion; many people have written about the indoctrination of students at all
levels of our educational system. You
learn what your teacher wants you to learn, right or wrong. Then as adults the learning does not stop
with your education, most adults, certainly not you, get most if not all of
their current information from the television news, their computers, and/or
soon to be out of print newspapers. What
makes the adult version of becoming “knowledge based” so wrong, is that adults
only seem to learn what the television anchors have chosen for them to learn
and know about. In other words, if most
adults are not paying close attention, they will not recognize the fact that
they are being spoon fed very small clips of information about people, current
events, news stories and situations that could affect their lives, in the near
future and the distant future. More
importantly they could be watching and hearing news that is actually fake news,
untrue, a lie, call it whatever you want; it’s just not true; COVID comes to mind! If
that does not scare you, I am going to suggest that you may in fact be a member
of the ignorant or stupid group of Americans.
Want more proof? Sure you do.
I draw your attention to the website that follows that reports,
according to a Gallop Poll. that Americans “SAY” they read about
12 books a year or one a month. Is that
a real number to be believed? Maybe so,
maybe not; I don’t know. What is the important
question NOT asked? Were the
books fiction or non-fiction? To me,
reading fiction is more for enjoyment, not to learn something of significant
value. If you read non-fiction books,
hopefully you are learning something of value.
I spent over 33 years in real estate sales as a salesman, broker and
trainer. I could not help but notice
that very few of the agents ever read any books on sales or customer
relations. To put that into perspective,
would you want to buy a home from someone who does not stay atop of his or her
profession by reading about the profession?
Would you want a heart surgeon to operate on your heart if the surgeon
hasn’t read anything on heart surgery since he or she first became a surgeon? I think it is safe to say you would not
choose an ignorant real estate agent nor an ignorant heart surgeon. https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx
Since my early 40s, I
have made a conscious decision to read AT LEAST ONE book PER MONTH
but had a target of TWO BOOKS per month. For decades I met the latter challenge. Now approaching my 80s, that represents a
great many books and only about 1% were fiction! I studied my real estate profession and I
carefully chose the books I decided to read.
I wanted them to fill a void in my education or my experience and just
as important, where I saw my career going next.
I once counted up all of the books and eBooks I had read and they
exceeded 1000.
Since the early 1990s, I
have moved on to reading more and more books and articles on politics, world
history, U. S. History, biographies of famous and infamous people. It was about this time that I came upon a
phrase I had not heard before – becoming awaken! What did that mean? I now know what it is supposed to mean but
how is it defined in the dictionary or on the Internet? Here you go:
to become conscious or aware of something
awoke to the possibilities
At the same time, Italian
prosecutors awoke to the international magnitude of their Sicilian
underworld …—Selwyn Raab
To me, this is exactly
what being “awake” meant but I would have expanded on the examples
provided. The Internet used the word
“possibilities”, I would have added “probabilities”, “natural progression if
left unchecked”, “natural digression if left unchecked” and finally “stagnation
through conscientious stupidity!”
People in general,
certainly not you, CONSCIENTIOUSLY HAVE CHOSEN TO BE STUPID on all
things involving their environment and politics or they CONSCIENTIOUSLY
CHOOSE TO BE LEARNED! The Learned
People are AWAKE PEOPLE.
The Stupid People are the people that sleep walk through life verifying
how Alfred Einstein defined insanity, “Doing the same things over
and over and expecting different results.”
WHICH ONE ARE YOU?
WHICH ONE DO YOU THINK YOU SHOULD BE AS COMPARED TO THE ONE YOU ACTUALLY
ARE?
I have chosen to be AWAKE!
I have become awaken by reading, by listening to different opinions and
beliefs as expressed in written words and spoken words of people from all walks
of life; not just the words TAUGHT in schools or spoken on the
television programs. And…while I am on
the subject, have you ever asked why they are called “programs?” Could it be that both our schools and our main
stream media and all of the various television shows are doing nothing by
“programming” the way we think. If so,
we all, except those who have been awakened, we all begin to think in a very
certain way. As an example, how could
anyone think that allowing millions of non-U. S. Citizens to cross into America
is a good thing for our country? If that
is all you hear and read, that is what you will ultimately think, believe in
and even argue for. Look at all of the
topics in today’s news that you should be questioning as to why they are being
allowed to happen. Could it be that we
as a society are being systematically “programmed” to think in those
terms? IN MY OPINION, RIGHT OR WRONG,
IT IS MY OPINION THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING TO AMERICA BY
AMERICANS! Also in my OPINION,
that makes the millions of Americans who cannot see the disaster just waiting
to happen as being bone-headed thinking all originating from CONSCIOUSLY
STUPID AMERICANS!
I have become very
discouraged that I have chosen the road “less traveled” and I can assure you
that while there is very little traffic on that path, it is a lonely road to
follow. On both sides of the road,
millions of people have lined up to throw stones at those transiting the path
to becoming awakened to all that is happening around them. That is a very
uncomfortable feeling. I know this
because…
People who have chosen
to become knowledgeable (awake) about activities and circumstances that could
eventually become very harmful to civilization, should be respected, not
ridiculed! It will be those who have
been awaken to the depravity, corruption and the wars created by governments
all around the world, who will eventually open the eyes of those who have consciously
or unconsciously chosen the path of “conscientious stupidity”, the opposite of
which, is “enlightenment!”
C. JoyBell C, “The
dance between darkness and light will always remain— the stars and the moon
will always need the darkness to be seen, the darkness will just not be without
the light.”
I could say that slightly differently:
“The
dance between ignorance and knowledge will always remain;
the
stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, ignorance cannot
exist with the light of the knowledge so readily available!
The
information is out there, all YOU have to do is:
seek it
out and then, let it in!”