Ignorance Is Bliss?

“If I’m not going to like it, I don’t want to hear it.” I have repeatedly told this phrase to my friend Bianca, also known as “the bearer of bad news”, yet she continues to tell me things I genuinely do not want to know. A few days ago, at one of our weekly get-togethers at her apartment, she casually informed me that my kindergarten boyfriend, the love of my life at that time, kissed half the girls in our class while he was with me. Needless to say, I absolutely did not want to know this. Why would she ruin my perfect childhood romance by revealing that my beloved was a little Casanova? I would have rather lived happily in my ignorance with my false, yet perfect, image of my first love. That brings me to the question, is not-knowing, as a rule of thumb, better than knowing?

Are less intelligent people happier than more intelligent ones? Since intelligence is a fairly subjective matter, for practical reasons, let us refer to it in terms of knowledge.

The General Social Survey asks a certain group of individuals about happiness and tells them to complete a basic vocabulary test as a measure of intelligence. The people are divided into top, middle, and bottom categories according to their levels of intelligence. The survey showed no significant discrepancy in the happiness of the top, middle, and bottom categories. Nevertheless, when it came to unhappiness, only 8% of the top and middle sections claimed to be unhappy, while 14% in the bottom third declared themselves as unhappy.

In our modern era where capitalism rules the world, one would logically assume that intelligent people are happier. Brains get you higher-paying jobs and money brings you happiness; simple as that. The successful corporate lawyer, who graduated from Harvard, surely appears to be more content with his life than the unemployed fellow who was not smart enough to even get into college.

It is not a challenge to conclude that knowledge, when involving one’s degree of intelligence, leads to success and, therefore, happiness. Yet, when it comes to non-intellectual knowledge, can we arrive to the same conclusion? My friend Bianca did me no favor by telling me my kindergarten boyfriend was outrageously unfaithful to me. When I found this out, my life was not positively affected. If anything, it was negatively affected. I was happier not knowing of my lover’s infidelities. My ignorance certainly did not hurt me in any way. Here, I can affirm that my ignorance was, indeed, bliss. Yet I cannot make a generalization based on my trivial situation.

For the most part, in exception to my mild heartbreak, ignorance does not lead to bliss. Think about it this way: success brings happiness and success without knowledge is practically unfeasible. Great things cannot be accomplished by living in the darkness. Of course there will always be instances in which we are better off being ignorant. I myself have agreed to this by posing the example of my adulterous childhood boyfriend. As Anatole France said, “A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.” Evidently it is up to one’s judgment to decide when to opt for ignorance and when to opt for knowledge. Yet, as rational individuals, in most life situations, we are aware of when we are being ignorant- we are aware that there is a reality out there that we have not yet been exposed to. Sooner than later, we are bound to be awakened to such reality and the longer we have lived in a perfect lie, the cruder our awakening will be. A happy fool is only happy for so long.