Poisoning the Well

Scrolling through my feed this morning it struck me that the scroll is a mess — the wisdom of the world obscured by stains, by scrawl, by graffiti, whole sections torn away. The well is so poisoned. How did it come to be this way?

Each of us arrives at knowledge through a keyhole. However widely traveled, however voraciously read, each of us has experienced a vanishingly small fraction of what there is to experience — a sliver of one brief lifetime. The most erudite among us has read perhaps a few thousand books. The most adventurous has visited perhaps a hundred countries. Against the sum of all that has ever been thought, witnessed, and lived, this is nothing.

And even that sliver is unreliable. We hallucinate. We confabulate. We are warped by cognitive biases we cannot see precisely because they are the lens we see through. What we see is not what is there… it is an ongoing interpretation that need only provide a working narrative. Our powers of perception evolved for survival, not erudition.

In short: left to our own devices, we know very little, and much of what we think we know is wrong.

And yet collectively much is known.

Knowledge of any significant depth or breadth is an aggregate acquired over time. No one invented wine, much less the language required to transmit the art of fermentation. We have two eyes and that gives us depth perception. Relatedly we can make use of parallax: the technique of observing a distant object from two different positions to determine its true location. I think of this as “triangulation of awareness.”

This is what we offer each other. We bear witness to that which is. From that we can determine the where and what of existence to a precision orders of magnitude beyond what any single pair of eyes can grant us.

This triangulation is nothing new, but science has made it far more rigorous and powerful. It is the systematic process by which we overcome the limitations of our senses and the impediments of our biases. It replaces the crudities of received wisdom with something far more self-aware, more flexible, and designed to be corrected.

Alas, many among us undermine the triangulation. The water in the well is adulterated… deliberately or through a carelessness so habitual it is indistinguishable from intent. Some lie knowingly, some to escape consequence, some for the perverse comfort of righteousness. Many prefer unwarranted certainty that feels better than accuracy, and have made their peace with that bargain. And some trade in fantasy. Perhaps not always cynically, sometimes with genuine belief.

Some know they are lying. Some do not. The latter may be the more dangerous, because they bring the full conviction of the self-deceived blithely polluting the well.

Individually, the damage might be (at best) marginal. A comfortable untruth, a belief held against all evidence… perhaps these can be contained, even provide solace. We are mortal, frightened creatures and not every illusion exacts a price beyond the local and the personal.

But collectively the stakes are different. Knowledge is a commons. The triangulation of awareness only works if enough of us are bearing honest witness. To bear false witness (intentionally or otherwise) might not be a sin in the old sense, but it is a transgression with woeful and too often lethal consequence.

Instead of a font of knowledge the well is poisoned. We are left to bob for apples of wisdom in a trough of slop polluted by our willful and witless pontifications.

So when you speak, or text, or post, pause a moment. At least try not to poison the well we all must drink from.