Knowledge Is Powerless Unless You Know Its Power

"Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge."
- Machiavelli, The Prince

Before I ever read the above passage I knew its truth. As a child, when I found an insect in my room I would make sure to kill it on the first attempt; elsewise, it was my fear that it would scurry for a hiding place to plot revenge. That being said, it has been my observation that the most seemingly obvious truths are the ones that bear repeating. It is one thing to know the obvious and another to know the obvious. To acquire the certainty of italicization is to have not just learned, but learned to remember. Experience is a powerful teacher in this regard; I've learned to impress upon myself what not to do by having done exactly that. For instance, in social situations, I've learned to watch my words and think before speaking; to be careful about revealing more than is safe to reveal. This should be obvious, but I still forget it enough that I have been tempted to get it tattooed on my wrist; preferably in a foreign language only I know so other people don't realize I have crib notes on my skin.

Pain and anguish are deep enough emotions that we remember what caused them so as to avoid it in the future. This is simple social conditioning and why children like to test their boundaries - because they haven't learned yet what causes pain and anguish - and why parents punish them when they do - so that they then learn. Not all lessons are learned in childhood, however, and when we make mistakes as adults we are treated less with well-meaning punishment and more with harsh derision. Eventually, if we do not kill ourselves or other people first, we learn from this harsh derision; but it is a painful process that causes us (or at least me) to accumulate a variety of people we never want to see again because of the stupid and embarrassing things we've said and done in front of them. First relationships (and second and third and fourth . . .) are a fitting example because we do not learn how to deal with the situations that arise in them as children and it takes much trial by fire to learn that the opposite sex is in fact a different breed of human being.

Popular media, that omnipresent involuntary teacher, hinders more than it help. It presents a false image of life as sitcom or music video that must be unlearned before learning can begin. But this is obvious some might reply; everyone knows the difference between reality television and reality, violent video games and war. I'm sure they do in a non-italicized way, but that doesn't stop those caught in a crossfire from telling reporters that "it was like a movie." It is not enough to know in a surface, half-ironic, playful and postmodern way the difference between bullets and pixels; one has to know concretely through the pain of getting shot. The alternative, which brings us back to the passage I began with, is to pay attention to the results of other people's painfully pedagogic experiences. I find no better way to do so than through books, the best of which put into words what we didn't even realize was translatable to words, what we thought were unspeakable truths. Reading is not a replacement for living but it is a vital and necessary supplement. Through books we may know what we already knew before being struck in the face by its cold reality.