Every accusation against man amounts to one thing: his believing he knows that which he does not. (Save theft), every condemnation man can or ever has leveled at his fellow creatures, (that they are stupid, asleep, unenlightened), all indirectly and unwittingly point to the one thing: man’s believing that he knows things which he does not.
The only accusations non-thinking creatures make always concerns theft. Theft of what one creature physically possesses, (food, territory, mate, or its life), and the complaints are physically registered, transiting the mere animal sphere. The accusations unique to man always concern something non-physical he claims to possess – knowledge. Without clearly realizing what they are involved in, men constantly condemn one another under a variety of verbal indictments, but they all boil down to but a single pimple: men believing that they know things which they do not.
A man will peacefully accept that another man knows nothing about plumbing, as long as he admits it and does not attempt to pretend otherwise. Unpretentious ignorance is always acceptable everywhere, but what men are unknowingly made to find verbally intolerable in one another, when they believe they sense same, is a person insisting they have knowledge of a particular matter when, to the accuser’s eyes they clearly do not. This, however, is a quite limited and forcefully subjective game amongst the ordinary, and leads no one to new insights and discoveries. The sport is confined to an endless cycle of: accusations, defenses and counter accusations.
One man’s thoughts cause him to say that a second man’s professed political beliefs are foolish and without rational foundation; that he does not know what he is talking about. He does this without him ever questioning the basis of his assured-felt accusation, not that he would find one if he looked for it, any more than one could be discovered for the beliefs of the second man which he condemned.
Regarding matters in man’s non-physical second reality, experts exist only by pretending to know things they do not know, and those who listen to these experts, know that they do not know, but they pretend not to know that the experts do not know. No two way pretending, no world of culture, entertainment and civilization.
J.