Knowledge is scary

There may be certain things about the world or about yourself that you don't want to know. So if someone points out these things, maybe you get angry with the person pointing it out - the old story: don't like the message, shoot the messenger. Surely this is really quite remarkable: people are afraid of knowledge. Ponder that. Boko Haram and the like are just the extreme manifestation of something you can see everyday on Facebook - or even, too often, in the aggressively 'progressive' and 'tolerant' environment of many university classrooms (i.e., the supposed enemies of Boko Haram). People are afraid of knowledge; especially self-knowledge. But they still grasp that knowledge is a genuinely good and desirable thing. That's why they lap up absurd, self-righteous narratives about how enlightened they are, in comparison to all the people who have thought or do think differently from themselves and their narrow set - even when they have no idea of what those other people thought or think and why they thought or think it. And so they get angry if you question their absurd, self-righteous narratives. If they're 'progressive' types, they'll often go so far as to angrily dismiss you as a bully or a bigot - why? - because you have dared to challenge them to think critically about their precious 'progressive' viewpoints... and somehow they fail to see the irony! So do you laugh or weep? What a waste of time even trying to talk to such people! And yet, they remain fellow citizens and fellow human beings. We still have to live together. So even though it so often seems like a waste of time, we are not absolved from the responsibility to at least try to make positive contributions to public discourse. (And that's what your 'personal' FB page is: if people can see it, by definition it's public.)