Sociopath Community

They say "ignorance is bliss."

I think a lot of hatred and sexism, racism etc . are just because lack of knowledge.

In my opinion, anorexia develops because of an individual's need for power and control over their reality and over themselves. Because weight is the focus, thinness is associated with control, power and success and fatness with the loss of control and failure. 

When someone's reality makes sense to them, when their pespective (however ignorant) supports their sense of self and sense of control, there is no need to entertain new  ideas that are contrary or challenging. 

I don't think they are afraid of being smarter... IMO they are more likely afraid of being challenged (because that opens the possibility of being proved wrong). Our minds are built out of layers of assumptions, knowledge, experiences, etc,  and if it turns out that something we filed under knowledge turns out to be a false assumption, then the foundations for everything that was built on top is questionable. I think weakly built minds instinctively know if something will challenge them, and look for the easiest justification/action to avoid that challenge.

The brain doesn't feel pain in the conventional sense, but this kind of sense-of-self-trauma hurts the mind by being emotionally painful (shame, guilt, embarrassment, self-loathing) or potentially in the case of the sociopath, some similar form of ego damage.

Couple this with the fact that we are primed to generally avoid pain, and voila! There's your mechanism for how even very smart people can be so wilfully stupid.

Writing this, I have a follow on question for any masochists. Do you find it pleasurable to admit long-accepted mistakes/errors/faults?

"Writing this, I have a follow on question for any masochists. Do you find it pleasurable to admit long-accepted mistakes/errors/faults?"

Not really. It doesn't really hurt to do those things either, unless it targets something else as well. Mistakes and errors teach lessons while faults give room to grow.

I don't think it has anything to do with my masochism though. I just, in many cases, gain more from the persistence following constant loss than from the convenience of constant winning. A loss means I was bested, which is both worthy of respect and it gives something to aspire toward. A victory just shows that I won.

Fair enough. Maybe it has nothing to do with pain then, or perhaps a flexibly constructed mind can simply bend around the ego damage.

For my curiosity, do you have to be in the mood for masochism, or is it "always on" for you?

Mine's from Algolagnia, so it's actually more about me perceiving pain improperly than idolizing some sort of idea.

It's always on, and it's not always a good thing.

Knowledge Ignorance would be a better title. Too many people are ignorant toward academic learning. I don't imagine they are afraid of becoming more intelligent, but I rather believe it's down to laziness and/or lack of motivation. They are not motivated to improve themselves and are too lazy to try. I will never understand peoples reasoning for this and it happens too often.

In this day and age, with the ease that materials from which to learn can be acquired it's incredible that there are people that make a conscious choice to not learn.

floki

Everything in moderation,  including knowledge. 

There's no short answer as to what causes knowledge intolerance, but in the spirit of brevity I'm going to come right out and accuse any and all ideologies as being the leading culprits in mass ignorance.