In Plato's Apology, a jury considers whether to punish Socrates. In Greek, Apology or "Apologia" means defense, and thus Socrates offers no modern apology but only a defense. In his defense, Socrates recounts how the Oracle of Delphi declared him to be the wisest person in Athens. Skeptical, Socrates explores Athens for a wiser person—whether a politician, an artist, or anybody else. He questions these supposedly wise individuals, and he discovers that all of them essentially know nothing and put up a facade to hide their ignorance. Therefore, Socrates agrees with the Oracle of Delphi’s judgment: Socrates knows that he knows nothing and thus knows one more thing than everyone else, making him the wisest in Athens.
Libertarians have correctly taken this idea to heart in forming their paradigm of the world. After all, libertarians understand that, in the words of the Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Economics illustrates how peaceful market transactions coordinate dispersed knowledge among relatively ignorant individuals. Thus, one of the (several) major flaws in centralized governmental actions is the false assumption that a centralized group of bureaucrats has or can obtain widespread knowledge of local circumstances to wield for the general welfare. Socrates understood and rejected this facade of individuals assuming much greater knowledge than they could ever have—the facade of, again in Hayek's words, "The Pretense of Knowledge."
This insight has much more relevance than merely in economics or public policy: it is central to an understanding of knowledge. As the economist Leonard Read artfully, metaphorically illuminates in his book The Love of Liberty:
"Socrates was aware of a simple and self-evident fact: the more one learns, the larger looms the Unknown. This point is easy to grasp. Merely visualize in the mind’s eye a sheet of black, infinite in dimensions—the Unknown. Now whiten a small circle to represent your awareness, perception, consciousness of, say, a decade ago. Next whiten a greatly enlarged circle to depict your growth during the past ten years. Observe how much more darkness you as a learner are exposed to now than earlier. A good guideline to assess progress: if daily the Unknown is not looming larger, one is not growing."
As one’s horizon expands, the Unknown becomes more comprehensible. People better recognize the limitations on their own knowledge as they grow beyond their prior limits.
Over time, I've learned to appreciate the relationship between the Unknown and people’s emotional responses, particularly anger and the associated demonizing of others. Speaking for myself, I know that other people’s views used to infuriate me because of the relative certainty I had for my own beliefs and values. Why would I be angry!?!?!? Because how could anybody seriously hold position X on topic Y!?!?!?
The above question is key. People regularly ask rhetorically, "How Could Anybody Believe that?" Yet, it should not be a rhetorical question because the answer needs and deserves to be answered and analyzed. The unfamiliarity with, and even fear of, the Unknown reveals itself through such anger. The fear of the Unknown caused a jury to execute Socrates, and the same "fear" or discomfort or whatever word you would like to use similarly caused me to be angry at other people’s differing views. If I had actually confronted the opposing idea before and seriously analyzed it, if the essentials of the idea were not outside the scope of my known and within the scope of my Unknown, then I would have a non-rhetorical answer ready. The lack of a satisfactory, well-thought out answer leaves anger to fill the void. Anger is a fill-in emotion for confrontations with the Unknown.
It is not just Past Me that acts this way. From reading what a lot of people write and speaking with a lot of people, I am fairly sure that the most ill-informed and ignorant comments have almost always been angry ones. I do not mean that every angry statement is foolish; meticulous anger has its place. But, most of the time, angry statements are foolish ones reflective of how confrontations with the Unknown cause people to express themselves through anger. If people do not have well-thought out responses to an idea, then they have usually not encountered or seriously thought about the idea before. Thus, without wisdom, all they have left is anger. The bridge separating people from the Unknown is built with anger.
Although I have found the above to be widely true, the way academics and similar intellectuals confront the Unknown deserves special comment. In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced height) explains that people’s “moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth” partially because, from an evolutionary perspective, people’s reasoning abilities likely developed more to persuade other people than to determine the truth. The use of reasoning to promote confirmation bias instead of truth-seeking applies particularly strongly among academics and intellectuals. According to experiments Haidt cites by reasoning researcher David Perkins, when researchers task people of various ages and education levels with generating arguments about social issues such as the relationship between school funding and the quality of the learning environment, IQ most strongly predicts by a wide margin the number of arguments people can generate. However, these smart people who can compellingly argue for their own position have no greater tendency to find reasons in favor of the other side, making their heightened intelligence a tool for better persuading people of their own biases without necessarily having a more complete understanding of differing positions. In Perkins’ words, “people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.” Thus, according to Haidt, academics and intellectuals with greater intelligence frequently devote their gifts and time to more skilled and elaborate confirmation bias.
The combination of individual intelligence and confirmation bias shows why academics and intellectuals tend to be particularly righteous and close-minded. Academia does a relatively poor job of having people confront the Unknown as disciplines often substantially develop groupthink that leads to the unwarranted exclusion of differing views. Within specialized fields, thinkers and experts believe that they approach the outer limits of their discipline’s scope without having critically interacted with many dissenting viewpoints. By neglecting to leave their comfort zones and engage with an Unknown that may diverge from their biases, they assume they have read everything on a topic and close themselves off from truly confronting the Unknown. This method of learning leads people to a close-minded righteous certainty, grounded in a belief in self-expertise from widely reading people who agree with them and scarcely interacting with disagreeing ideas.
To expand on Leonard Read's metaphor, many academics and intellectuals do not evenly widen their white circles of knowledge into the infinitely black Unknown. Rather, their knowledge grows like an oval that only irregularly explores the surrounding darkness, overlooking much of the Unknown without even realizing it. Consequently, rather than having a circle of knowledge that evenly approaches darkness and allows people to realize their limitations, many academics and intellectuals have not seen far into the Unknown on the shorter edges of their oval of knowledge, causing them in those untraversed regions to close off their thought processes and engage in righteous anger. Whereas an expanding circle reflects a well-rounded learning process, an expanding oval fosters a more limited confirming process.
As a concluding recommendation, generally, if you are angry at views people hold, ask yourself one question: Is there something about these people that suggests they would hold completely and totally unreasonable positions? The answer is almost always no. Even if their position is wrong, it probably has explicit or implicit reasons. If you cannot explain those reasons as if you believed them Ideological Turing Test-style and if you cannot describe afterwards the problems with those reasons, then the real reason for your anger is your own limitations.
In the past, my anger did not stem from other people; it reflected the shortcomings in my own knowledge. Likewise, as advice to other angry people: it is not them; it is you.