Communities and the Co-Creation of Ignorance, Part 2

Communities and the

Co-Creation of Ignorance

PART 2

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

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I - Broadly

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance,

[but] the illusion of knowledge.

- Daniel Boorstin

Ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge. It is something we make — co-created, sustained, and institutionalized by the very communities we inhabit. Through our shared customs, stories, silences, and systems, we collectively decide which truths to spotlight and which to suppress.

Cultures shape epistemology. They tell us what counts as worth knowing, who is allowed to speak, and whose voices can be ignored. From school curricula to media platforms, from religious teachings to political rhetoric, communal life functions as a layered filter — amplifying some truths while muffling others.

• History textbooks in many nations celebrate military victories and national heroes, but erase legacies of slavery, colonization, or genocide.

• News cycles sensationalize immediate drama while sidelining slow-moving catastrophes like ecological collapse or economic injustice.

• Religious doctrines often teach selective moral clarity while silencing historic complicity in racism, misogyny, or empire.

These are not isolated blind spots; they are social strategies. In each case, ignorance is engineered — not to deceive maliciously, but to stabilize identity, justify the status quo, and preserve collective pride. The result is what process thought might call a structured negation of becoming: the deliberate closure of possibilities that threaten comfort or control.

Such ignorance is never neutral. It is entangled in power, memory, and myth. It defines who belongs, who suffers, and what truths can be told.

In this way, communities establish “zones of silence” — forbidden terrains of memory or knowledge where difficult truths are kept at bay. These zones protect the collective self-image. But they do so at immense cost: they obscure justice, distort history, and delay healing.

The task, then, is not simply to accumulate more knowledge. It is to unmask the mechanisms of collective forgetting — and to ask what it would mean to become communities that no longer need to silence the truth in order to survive.

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II - Locally (MAGAism)

A lie can travel halfway around the world

while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

- Often attributed to Mark Twain

I - MAGAism and the Weaponization of Ignorance

If ignorance is often co-created, it can also be weaponized. The MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement offers a clear and troubling case study of this phenomenon.

In the world of MAGAism, ignorance is not passive — it is strategically curated. Disinformation campaigns, rejection of electoral legitimacy, hostility toward science, and historical revisionism are deployed not as lapses in understanding, but as instruments of political power. Here, truth becomes negotiable, and loyalty to personality replaces loyalty to principle.

This weaponized ignorance operates on multiple levels:

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✦ Individuals

Conspiracy theories like QAnon, COVID-19 vaccine microchip myths, or climate denial fracture families, isolate individuals from reality, and cultivate fear. These beliefs do not simply emerge — they are seeded, circulated, and reinforced through algorithmic echo chambers and partisan media ecosystems. In processual terms, they narrow the horizon of becoming, diminishing the relational openness that sustains truth and trust.

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✦ Communities

Churches, schools, and neighborhoods become polarized and fragile. Once-plural spaces of shared identity are hollowed into zones of suspicion. School boards turn into ideological battlefields. Pulpits preach not grace, but grievance. Deliberation collapses under the weight of partisan absolutism. Communities become echo chambers of engineered antagonism.

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✦ Nations

Shared democratic symbols - the flag, the Constitution, the idea of truth itself - fracture into competing fictions. Institutions once grounded in law and deliberation are eroded by performative rage and manufactured distrust. National coherence gives way to cultural fragmentation, threatening the very viability of governance.

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✦ Economies

Anti-scientific rhetoric bleeds into national priorities. Pandemic denial costs lives and impairs healthcare systems. Resistance to renewable energy delays climate action. Attacks on education destabilize curricula and undermine future innovation. In the MAGA worldview, expertise becomes suspect — weakening the foundations of a thriving, adaptive economy.

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✦ Democracy

Perhaps most fundamentally, democracy itself suffers. When truth becomes subordinated to tribal identity, facts can no longer hold a nation together. The social contract unravels, and authoritarianism rushes in to fill the void left by the collapse of shared reality. Elections become suspect, journalism becomes “fake news,” and law becomes selectively applied.

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✦ Conclusion

MAGAism reveals that ignorance is not simply “not knowing” — it is a calculated refusal to know, shaped and sustained by power. It is a form of epistemological violence — a disruption of truth designed to consolidate control. This is not ignorance as accident; it is ignorance as strategy.

To respond, we must do more than correct falsehoods. We must understand the ecosystem that sustains them — and cultivate counter-processes that reweave relationship, restore trust, and nurture a shared reality in which all can participate.

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III - Methodologies for Mapping Ignorance

We are not only stewards of what we know

but responsible for the ignorance we allow to persist.

- Miranda Fricker

Ignorance is not simply what we fail to know. It is often what we are trained not to see - shaped, maintained, and enforced by cultural systems, institutional power, and social norms. To understand ignorance as a structured presence rather than a passive absence, several scholarly methodologies offer critical insight.

Each of the frameworks below equips us with tools to unmask how ignorance is produced, protected, and perpetuated:

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✦ Agnotology: The Deliberate Production of Ignorance

Coined by historian Robert Proctor, agnotology is the study of how ignorance is intentionally manufactured. Industries such as tobacco and fossil fuels provide clear examples: for decades, they funded misleading research and PR campaigns to “cast doubt” on settled science — first about the dangers of smoking, then about climate change.

Result: Delayed public health interventions, environmental degradation, and millions of preventable deaths. Ignorance here is not innocent; it is a strategy.

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✦ Standpoint Theory: The Positional Nature of Truth

Developed by feminist and critical race theorists, standpoint theory argues that marginalized groups often perceive truths hidden from dominant perspectives. Excluding these voices doesn't just silence people — it erases insight.

Example: Women of color raised early alarms about environmental injustice—such as unsafe housing or toxic waste in low-income neighborhoods—long before mainstream acknowledgment. Their standpoint provided epistemic access others lacked.

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✦ Epistemic Injustice: The Ethics of Knowing and Being Known

Philosopher Miranda Fricker introduced the concept of epistemic injustice — harm done to someone in their capacity as a knower. This takes two main forms:

Testimonial injustice: When a speaker’s word is discredited due to prejudice (e.g., a Black teenager’s eyewitness account is dismissed in court).

Hermeneutical injustice: When a person lacks the cultural tools to articulate experience (e.g., before the term sexual harassment existed, women’s workplace abuse was often unintelligible to legal systems).

Implication: Injustice doesn’t just operate through actions—it distorts what can be said, heard, or believed.

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✦ Discourse and Power: Framing the Limits of Thought

Michel Foucault’s work on discourse and power reveals how institutions define what counts as knowledge. What we call “truth” is often shaped by “regimes of truth”—authorized by those in power, enforced through norms, and protected by language.

Example: During the Cold War, mainstream U.S. political discourse rendered any defense of socialism “un-American.” This narrowed the public’s conceptual horizon, making certain economic alternatives almost unthinkable—even when urgently needed.

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✦ Synthesis: Ignorance as Structured Presence

Together, these methodologies expose ignorance not as a blank space, but as a constructed terrain - shaped by power, institutional design, cultural habits, and selective memory. To resist toxic unknowing, we must learn to interrogate how and why certain truths are obscured, discredited, or rendered invisible.

Understanding ignorance requires more than adding information. It demands we reconfigure the frameworks of attention, authority, and expression - the very structures by which knowledge becomes possible.

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IV - Processual Epistemology: Ignorance as Frontier

The many become one, and are increased by one.

- Alfred North Whitehead

From a process perspective, ignorance is not simply a failure - it is a feature of an unfinished, unfolding reality. In a world that is open, relational, and in constant becoming, ignorance is inevitable. It arises not because we are flawed, but because we are not yet complete. The question is not whether ignorance exists, but how we respond to it.

Communities can either distort ignorance into rigidity and fear, or receive it as an invitation—a horizon from which creativity, transformation, and justice can emerge. A processual epistemology reframes ignorance through four overlapping lenses:

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✦ Structural: Systems That Shape Knowing

All knowledge is shaped by structures—schools, media, religious institutions, governments. These systems decide not only what we know, but what remains hidden.

When schools ban books or censor curricula (e.g., on race or gender), they don't just omit facts—they build walls of ignorance.

But schools can also become sites of positive disruption: teaching students not only what is known, but how to ask: What don’t we know yet?

Ignorance becomes dangerous when structures are used to narrow inquiry. It becomes creative when structures cultivate curiosity, complexity, and courage.

✦ Relational: Who Is Allowed to Speak?

Ignorance grows where dialogue collapses. When marginalized voices—whether of migrants, women, Indigenous communities, or religious minorities—are excluded, ignorance calcifies.

Silence is not neutral. It is often a symptom of power suppressing difference.

But when communities open space for genuine listening across difference, ignorance becomes a bridge to deeper understanding. In process thought, relation is the ground of becoming—so ignorance dissolves as relationality deepens.

✦ Invitational: Not-Knowing as Fertile Ground

Ignorance need not be shameful. It can be a threshold—a sign that something new is possible. In science, ignorance drives inquiry. In art, it fuels imagination. In faith, it cultivates humility before mystery.

Ignorance framed as failure leads to defensiveness.

Ignorance framed as horizon opens space for growth.

Communities that embrace the invitation of not-knowing become more adaptive, creative, and just.

✦ Ethical: The Morality of Ignorance

Not all ignorance is innocent. Some forms—like climate denial, historical revisionism, or racial erasure—are not passive but active refusals to engage with truth. These are not knowledge gaps; they are ethical failures.

By contrast, epistemic humility (“I may be wrong. I want to learn.”) transforms ignorance into moral growth.

From a processual lens, how we handle ignorance is a question of character, community, and care. Ignorance becomes a crucible in which ethical formation is tested and renewed.

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V - Conclusion: Ignorance as Edge of Becoming

Thus, in a process worldview, ignorance is not just a void to be filled. It is a living frontier—the edge of becoming. The question is not how to eliminate ignorance entirely (an impossible task), but how to live with it responsively, relationally, and redemptively.

Communities that treat ignorance as invitation rather than threat can transform what seems like limitation into a resource for justice, creativity, and solidarity. In this way, not-knowing becomes not just a problem—but a path.