Dangerous Knowledge

I think we all “grow up” when we realize that people don’t always mean what they say or say what they mean, it’s when we start figuring out what people actually mean when they say something.

Growing up takes time. It doesn’t strike you as a blessing on a Sunday afternoon. It is a process that may take years, decades or even an entire lifetime. It can also be viewed as an evolutionary or a neuro-biological phenomenon that is accrued vastly from the sum total of the experiences of one generation, an ideology or world view that they deem worthy of passing on to the next to ensure the prosperity of their lineage.

It is a discovery, a sense of realisation, of knowing something you didn’t a moment ago. The knowledge that comes with it is a quintessential part of human experience. It happens because we are the only species who have an infinite capacity to learn from other’s experiences. It comes at a price that must be paid with innocence. You lose the ability to seek goodness in everything and everyone, or at best learn to exercise it with ever increasing caution.

It cannot be undone, not in its entirety at least. As it is with science, theories you build once will always be under revision in the light of new observations and experiences, as and when you gain the ability to examine the world with more and more sophisticated tools- education. This knowledge does broaden your world view but while doing so it also confronts you with those infinite shades of grey that will forever cloud the ever expanding gulf between black and white.

It makes you question your understanding of faith and trust, making you a lifelong skeptic. You start constructing an invisible guard that you will now wield for the rest of your life, anxiously waiting, searching for people who can patiently, lovingly invade those numerous impregnable walls and manage to get close enough to wield that guard for you, with you. The walls keep getting higher and stronger each time someone fails to do so or surrenders in between.

It is magical how most of life is about sharing human experiences and knowledge but it is a pity how most of growing up is about understanding the perils of the same. I used to find it very ironic how everyone always wanted to be happy- to the extent that they would even be willing to play along with their own overtly pretentious social exercises like gatherings, festivities and celebrations, just to bath in the aura of collective goodness- but still, somehow, eventually end up more bitter and miserable than ever before. After all, why must there be anger, grief, regret, envy and suffering in a world where everyone wants to be happy?

I now realize it’s because of the pleasant delusion that is hope, that no matter how bad things get, we can always choose to believe that they can get better. This belief, although entirely self sufficient and independent of the dangerous knowledge, it seems comes much more conveniently to those who know less. May be it is just a part of the bliss that comes with ignorance but the one thing I have realized “growing up” is that when the long night comes, it is much easier to keep moving along when you do not know what kind of demons stand lurking in the dark.