When Knowing Becomes a Strategy for Survival

Knowing is useful. We learn so we can navigate, build, repair, decide, and avoid repeating mistakes.

But knowing can also acquire another job: protecting the person who knows.

We collect answers so we will not look foolish. We master a subject so no one can surprise us. We explain a person before they have finished speaking because uncertainty feels unsafe. Knowledge has not disappeared; it has become entangled with self-protection.

Werner Erhard described a turning point in his own account of the Golden Gate Bridge experience with the phrase that what he thought he knew had been known “in order to.” Whatever larger interpretation one gives that account, the phrase points to a useful everyday question: what is my knowing being used for right now?

Sometimes the answer is straightforward. We know where the fire exit is in order to leave safely. We know a procedure in order to perform it correctly. Instrumental knowledge is not a problem.

The inquiry becomes interesting when the hidden purpose is psychological. Am I trying to understand, or trying to make sure I cannot be wrong? Am I learning, or building a position from which nobody can challenge me? Am I using an explanation to meet reality, or to avoid the experience of not knowing yet?

A person can know a great deal and still leave room for uncertainty. Expertise and openness are not opposites. In fact, mature expertise often includes a clearer sense of what remains unknown.

The freedom is not ignorance. It is knowing without requiring knowledge to secure our identity.

Sometimes the next intelligent sentence is an answer. Sometimes it is, “I don’t know yet.”