Is Ignorance Really Bliss?

"Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up." -- Mr. Bayne's thoughts

Every class we ask ourselves, "Why?" Why do we care what is real and what isn't?

In Tim O'Brien's the Things They Carried, some of what we read actually occurred on the battlefield of Vietnam. Most of it didn't. Our discussion looped around the issue, speaking of the novel's commentary on storytelling and other themes, but at least in the back of my mind there was a persistent itch that I tried to ignore. (Was this the part that actually happened?) Questions that I tried not to ask. (Would I believe this emotionally if it were written by a non-war veteran?)

Way back at the beginning, while we discussed An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce in the gathering rain, questions that we had not yet learned to keep submerged littered the discussion . "Wouldn't it make sense if Farquhar had actually experienced some of this despite the twist ending?" It didn't even seem to matter that the character had never existed and hadn't experienced anything. "Did Farquhar really die at the end, or near the beginning?"

So my question is "why". Why does it matter to us? I'm not just asking this to make a point about how silly we are. It actually seems to be instinctive for us to figure out where the forgeries are, and it makes us uncomfortable as students and perhaps as human beings when we simply cannot. As Kurt Vonnegut alludes to in Cat's Cradle, like how the "tiger got to hunt", and "bird got to fly" (Cat's Cradle, chapter 81), humans need to question and question and question until we have everything figured out, or in any case collapse from exhaustion.

So is ignorance really bliss? Society has its systems of fakes and illusions, just like the forgeries in Philip Dick's The Man in the High Castle, and sometimes it seems like if we pop that bubble that it is going to burst the happiness of everyone. It might even be so that, as the character Wyndam-Matson says, "the word 'fake' [means] nothing really, since the word 'authentic' [means] nothing really" (Man in the High Castle, page 60). Perhaps the entire thing is pointless.

In my experience, though, living can not be done while in static ignorance. Perhaps a sort of struggling ignorance is all that is possible for humanity, with our limited perceptions, but in the philosophical, the academic, the experiencing world, we must ask the questions.

Even if we are insane, we can not help but want to know. The answer may hurt us; perhaps, however, we will be able to wake up. That possibility will force the human race to care for a long, long time.