24.6.12

CAPITALIST SOCIETY: INFORMED AND IGNORANT



Futurists of the 1960s suggested the terms "information society", "post-industrial" and "post-modern" society to describe the current form of social relations in the economically developed countries.

Of them, the least suitable one was "information society" as long as "information is used to imply "knowledge".

Turks translated "information" as "knowledge although they had different connotations. However, similar tricks can be seen in Anglophone world as well.

Information becomes the base and result of ignorance as long as it is not processed and developed into or used as a part of knowledge.

That I am informed does not automatically means that I know! But the reverse is true.

Central Intelligence Agency collects or receives "information" through its agents rather than knowledge.

Intelligence is defined as an easy reception ability of the crude reality instead of processing it theoretically. Intelligence does not necessarily imply "mind" and capability of processing information and the outer world completely and rationally, which require theory and philosophy.

Processing of information, of dispersed and crude reality and all surface appearances, just starts the production of knowledge.

Knowledge is the evaluation and comparison of all information with related information under the command of knowledge that uses knowledge, which is nothing but theory.

Without knowledge knowing knowledge or theory, information remains at the crude and dispersed level.

Information attracts and affects "brain", "senses", common sense and judgments but do not realize all those impacts over the mind, unless there is no theoretical mind, which is the knowledge of how to use knowledge.

Without theoretical mind, information just creates the base of crudely and schizophrenically working minds and then leads into "ignorance".

Thus we can suggest that  there is a contradictory relation between the growth of information and the development of ignorance in our age. Increasing numbers of the well "informed" people is combined by the decreasing numbers of the knowing people.

It is simply because production and circulation of information is not accompanied with the production and circulation of theoretical consciousness on the part of masses.

The most intellectual sections of all societies, who are scholars, work mainly on "research", which cannot be reduced to science  or may be only a part of its. Masses do not have even such a limited, initial level of knowledge production.

The result is absolute and relative rise of ignorance under the information age of capitalism.

***

It is nothing but "ignorant society".

***

Theory and philosophy is the commanding center of mind without which information and research do not leads into knowledge.

***

Therefore, there is a no any "contradictory relation between the growth of information and the development of ignorance in our age".

Wikileaks, for example, does not make known but just leaks information to the divided minds that are impotent in theoretical thinking.