The third option in a dichotomy

No dichotomy is complete if we can only see two options.

I want you to know less by the end of this essay. Not in a way that’ll make you stupid, of course. Knowing less won’t make you smarter either, quite obviously. There’s something else on offer.

We’re so obsessed with knowing more, we don’t even notice it. Education is better than no education, reading books is better than not. News is supposed to keep us informed and every article out there is supposed to tell us something new. Otherwise, why bother reading it?

In the dichotomy of knowing and not knowing, there are three options:

1. Knowing a lot makes you knowledgeable.

2. Not knowing much makes you ignorant.

3. Knowing you don’t know makes you wiser.

How is it that there’s a third option in a dichotomy? I don’t know, but let’s try to look at this paradox.

If learning more takes you from ignorance to knowledge, doubting what you know takes you in the direction of wisdom.

Socrates famously said:

Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know.

There’s more wisdom in this quote than in many books on the subject. Sometimes, and paradoxically, by saying less, sages like Socrates end up saying more.

Children don’t ponder paradoxes. They’re busy trying to form a mental map of the world, as they should: running across the road is dangerous, bananas go well with peanut butter, and the oven can get very-very hot.

But as adults, we inevitably discover that the world is more complex than what we thought. So we update our mental models and they get more sophisticated. We start giving some respect to the complexity of reality.

Things start to get interesting, though, when we realise quite clearly that our mental models will never be an adequate representation of the world. Furthermore, they are not only incomplete, they’re quite often wrong. Not only that, they are actually right from some perspectives and wrong from others. In a sense, we’re always wrong about everything, from a certain point of view.

That’s when we start getting curious about paradoxes. Here’s one of my favourites from Zen:

There’s no right and no wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong.

On the one hand, what is right and wrong isn’t an absolute. We all decide what’s right and what’s wrong depending on the situation and our values, with different people arriving at very different conclusions that they hold so strongly they’re willing to kill and die for them.

But on the other hand, we just can’t live in this world without taking a stand about what’s right and what’s wrong. Imagine something very wrong being done in front of you and you having the power to stop it — would it be right not to do it? That’s why right is right and wrong is wrong.

And that’s a paradox. There are plenty more. So many in fact, that if I look closely, the entire life is composed of nothing but paradoxes, or, at the very least, things I don’t understand if I’m totally honest.

And I believe that’s the case for everyone else, too, but, of course, I don’t know for sure.

Living life from the perspective of not knowing anything for sure can give rise to a different experience of life. Maybe a bit smoother, maybe a bit more wondrous.

When we think we know things, they appear ordinary to us, plain even. But when we don’t know, we start to see a touch of something extraordinary in the ordinary. Is extraordinary ordinary? Another paradox?

The third option in the dichotomy of knowing and not knowing is as real as the platform 9 3/4 in Harry Potter.

Remember how you need to run into the barrier between platforms 9 and 10 at Kings Cross to end up at the magical platform 9 3/4 where Hogwarts Express departs from to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry each September 1st at 11 a.m?

Knowing and not knowing are like platforms 9 and 10. They’re great, they can take you to Edinburgh and Cambridge. But if you want to walk a far richer world, you’ll need to embrace the third option in the dichotomy: approaching everything from an attitude of not knowing.

I find it harder than it sounds. It’s so easy for me to say that of course I don’t know anything for sure, but in my day to day life I constantly catch myself acting and feeling as if I’m absolutely sure of what I know.

“I’m sure he shouldn’t have done that...” “I know this is bad for me...” “If things go as planned, I’ll be able to relax…” “AI is going to kill us all…” “Tech progress will solve climate change…”

Not knowing is a practice. It’s not like knowledge that we acquire once and, hopefully, not forget later. It’s an attitude, a way of being, a relationship between you and the rest of the world. It’s not a tickbox, not an exam to pass.

It’s also a gift. A precious gift we’re given at the start of life for free and then throw away like a toy we outgrew, often with a tacit encouragement of adults who should know better.

Not knowing is a paradox. We want to get more out of life by trying to understand it and learn more about it, and yet this very attitude eventually gets in the way of living our life to the fullest.

We must strive to learn as much as we can, of course. May we also learn one of the deepest lessons offered by Socrates: that we ultimately know nothing.