On Not Knowing

We don’t really know what we want. We want what our genes tell us to want. We want what the marketplace wants to sell us. We want only what other people want. We want to be what other people want. We want to have sex with our mothers and to kill our fathers. We want what God wants through us. We want to be repressed. We don’t want anything. We want nothing. One thing’s for sure: what we want isn’t what we think we want.

We don’t really know who we are. We don’t know who anyone else is. We don’t know the world. We don’t know what we mean. We don’t know what anyone else means. We don’t know the point. We don’t know what we don’t know.

There are new gnostics among us, speaking the secret languages of hidden realms. They can translate what our subconscious is saying through us, or what our genes are saying, or what our society is saying. The gnostics can interpret what the war is really about, or the movie, or the empty spaces between the buildings. The way they speak, with facility and assurance but without obvious references to anything we already understand: is it truth or delirium? It’s another thing we don’t know.

We read that truths are propositions spoken in languages that float free of the world, and we wonder how such truths can be relied on. We read that truths are unveilings of the things themselves, but we find that even a thing fully exposed is just a thing. We read that truths are created and not discovered, and we wonder how this is any different from someone saying that the Holocaust never happened. We read that truth has been subsumed under interpretation, but we wonder what to call that thing that must be interpreted. We read that truths contain their own falsifications, and find ourselves wanting to take the easy way out.

These doubts don’t come naturally to us, and they certainly don’t help us concentrate our energies. Let’s step back into the world we left behind — it’s still there, full of people who speak a language we understand, doing things we know how to do. We’ve got skills: let’s go make some money.

There are more truths than we’re prepared to acknowledge.