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The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
Deliberate ignorance has been known as the 'Ostrich Instruction' in law courts since the 1860s. It illustrates a recurring pattern in history in which figureheads for major companies, political leaders and industry bigwigs plead ignorance to avoid culpability. So why do so many figures at the top still get away with it when disasters on their watch damage so many people's lives? Does the idea that knowledge is power still apply in today's post-truth world?
A bold, wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between ignorance and power in the modern age, from debates over colonial power and economic rent-seeking in the 18th and 19th centuries to the legal defences of today, The Unknowers shows that strategic ignorance has not only long been an inherent part of modern power and big business, but also that true power lies in the ability to convince others of where the boundary between ignorance and knowledge lies.
A bold, wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between ignorance and power in the modern age, from debates over colonial power and economic rent-seeking in the 18th and 19th centuries to the legal defences of today, The Unknowers shows that strategic ignorance has not only long been an inherent part of modern power and big business, but also that true power lies in the ability to convince others of where the boundary between ignorance and knowledge lies.
369 pages, Paperback
Published November 15, 2019
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425 people want to read
About the author
Linsey McGoey
6 books28 followersLinsey McGoey (b. 1978) is a Canadian sociologist and academic based in England. She is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. She is known for having written about philanthropy in her book No Such Thing as a Free Gift and co-editing the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies with Matthias Gross. Her next book, The Unknowers: How Elite Ignorance Rules the World, was published in 2019.
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February 10, 2020
Perhaps my favourite aphorism is from Isiah Berlin: “If we can know the truth, why would we choose to be deceived?” I know too well that I have been deceived on many topics for most of my life, I am repeatedly reminded that people in general do choose to be deceived and this book hammers home the point with painful force.
Linsey McGoey is a sociologist trained at the LSE and based now at Essex University. Her research material combines qualitative interview methods with investigative reporting and she brings in relevant material from academic literature and the history of ideas. Despite its obvious political implications, the book does strive to be open minded about its subject, which is to explore diverse ways in which public affairs are shaped by ignorance, both by accident and by design, and she considers the possibility that there are at least some merits as well as many important problems arising from this. In particular, in the face of awesome disparities of power, the persistent and unavoidable ignorance of our governing elites opens up many opportunities for effective social and political action. She strives to not be a doom merchant.
Many individuals, groups and public bodies deploy strategic ignorance as a way to secure desired goals and exclude unwanted frustrations. Refusal to collect statistics, for instance, obstructs informed public debate and legal scrutiny of some government policies. An over optimistic dependence on statistics and scientific evidence, on the other hand, as in the Utilitarian movement of 19th century England, does not necessarily protect us. Pharmaceutical companies infamously conceal inconvenient research findings, or fail to investigate issues of concern, while promoting research with convenient findings based on deceptive premises, to protect the often immense profitability of drugs despite their known, severely harmful effects. In an interesting chapter, McGoey explores the legal complexity of wilful ignorance and its many tricky nuances enabling corporations and their executives to evade accountability.
In the history of ideas, McGoey explores the suppression of critical information, either by ignoring major historical realities (such as the extent of state aid and protectionism in the 19th century era of so called free markets), editing out inconvenient material from the works of a writer like JS Mill, (who inconveniently credited his wife and daughter with joint authorship of his work), or by promoting edited versions of larger works that systematically exclude major sections in order to distort what we know of that work (as in the general ignorance of academics as well as the public about what Adam Smith really believed and said about the role of government in the largely unknown Volume 5 of his Wealth of Nations).
The latter issue also illustrates a larger problem, which is that those who express anger at the ignorance of the average voter and propose that only the more educated and affluent in the community should be allowed to vote, seem unable to imagine that the educated are often deluded in their shared beliefs or that the affluent are the beneficiaries of luck, with no valid evidence of greater average intelligence or wisdom. They forget also that the ignorance of the voters is the successful outcome of the way elites organise our affairs, and voter ignorance is a massive resource on which the elite depends for their own prosperity. They may mock it but they cannot survive without it.
This book is filled with lively and sometimes eye opening examples and anecdotes of the central role ignorance plays in our lives. Very little ignorance is the product of stupidity as such. Indeed, the greatest intellects are too often credited with wisdom in areas outside their special expertise, in which they not only know no more than the average citizen, but often are too arrogant to notice their own ignorance, while we are too easily confused into failing to point it out. As we despair at the ignorance of our elites, and rage at their promotion of ignorance, our last best hope may still rest in the secure knowledge that our elites are themselves ignorant and often plain wrong in many of their core beliefs.
What remains to achieve, of course, is that we choose not to be deceived. I have not abandoned Isiah Berlin’s aphorism just yet.
Quotes
‘General elections are always dismal affairs,’ the British economist John Maynard Keynes complained of the 1931 national elections, ‘but I do not think I remember any election in which more outrageous lies were told by leading statesmen.’ [p31]
...a point J.S.Mill made of Bentham: ‘There is hardly anything in Bentham’s philosophy which is not true. The bad part of his writings is his resolute denial of all that he does not see, of all truths but those which he recognises.’ [p37]
Ford had spent years presiding over the dissemination of anti-Semitic lies through his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent... Ford’s editors then bundled up op-eds from Dearborn Independent into a book, The International Jew, translated into dozens of languages. ... ‘The younger generation looked with envy to the symbols of success and prosperity like Henry Ford,’ commented a leader of the Nazi Students’ Federation. ‘And if Henry Ford said that the Jews were to blame, why, naturaly we believed him.’ .... William Allen White, a Pulitzer-winning author ... offered this remark: ‘It is a sad commentary on humanity that Ford’s great wealth has not revealed his ignorance, his mental sloth, and his incapacity to think. Man is always inclined to feel that greatness in one field of activity presumes greatness in all activities.” [p79-81]
‘One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don’t be the first guy through the door because you’re going to get all the arrows,’ [Stephen] Bannon said. ‘If it’s junk bonds, let Michael Milken lead the way.’ He added that one of Goldman’s strongest principles is ‘never lead in any product. Find a business partner.’ It’s a doctrine of deliberate anti-visibility: the strategic effort to makes one's ideas seem to have originated elsewhere to avoid the appearance of primary involvement. It’s a tactic for camouflaging one’s direct complicity through complex partnership structures. It’s a way to manufacture ignorance alibis. [p87]
Holding up Trump rather than, say, Barack Obama or George W. Bush as poster representatives of elite ignorance trivialises the problem of useful ignorance... It may be immoral but there’s nothing unusual about Trump’s willingness to lie or feign ignorance to protect himself and his wealth and political power... Trump gained his business degree from Wharton. Stephen Bannon got his MBA from Harvard. Both these men clearly benefitted from an ‘elite’ education. If they were tested on their political knowledge, there’s a very good chance they would pass the test – but this doesn’t mean that America would be better off with more Bannons in charge. [p93]
[Adam] Smith argues that merchants have a knack – sometimes dishonestly so and sometimes out of innocent error – for tricking other groups, including legislators, into believing that the merchants’ interest is the same as the public interest. Smith advises his readers against falling for this error. ‘The interests of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade and manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the publick.’... ‘any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till being long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the publick, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the publick, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it ... The masters, being fewer in number, can combine more easily and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit their combination, while it prohibits that of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.’ ... ‘We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters; though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.’ [p140-142]
But even allowing for an editor’s prerogative, though, the editing of Wealth of Nations during the 20th Century must still surely stand out as one of the most brazen knowledge heists in modern scholarship, with certain editions wilfully cutting out the entirety of Book 5. Titled ‘The Revenue of the Sovereign of the Commonwealth, ’ it is in this book- the longest of all five books in Wealth of Nations – that Smith details his arguments about the appropriate role of government in a market economy. ... when multiple versions omit the same book, it amounts to a pattern of wilful omission. The deliberate cutting of sections where Smith writes at length about the necessity of government intervention is an example of what I mean by elite ignorance, because it proves that what people today don't know about Smith isn’t simply accidental. [p144,145] ...It is ignorance born from too much narrow knowledge rather than simply a lack of information. And also, importantly, this example shows that it tends to be outsiders who lack specialist knowledge about a topic who can spot anomalies with a historical record. [p146]
In her rebuttal to Burke, she [Mary Wollstonecraft] is one of the first modern writers to articulate the problem known today as confirmation bias, the favouring of facts that support earlier assumptions. ‘When we read a book that supports our favourite opinions, how eagerly do we suck in the doctrine,’ she writes, ‘But when, on the contrary, we peruse a skilful writer, with whom we do not coincide in opinion, how attentive is the mind to detect fallacy.’ Everyone does it, she emphasizes, but Burke’s problem is that he doesn’t realize he does it. [p151]
Libraries are filled with studies of knowledge production, but the study of ignorance production is in its infancy. [p168]
‘[Rousseau] never spoke more truly than when he said: it takes a great deal of scientific insight to discern the facts that are closest to us.’ George Orwell reiterated the point when he famously observed: ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’ [p168]
My examples may seem like a scattered grouping, but they are chosen for their very eclecticisim, to show the way that patterns of strategic ignorance can be seen in many different areas of social and economic life. [p225]
The realization that people can be blinded by their own narrow expertise, and also the flipside of this problem, the fact that peoples’ individual experience can often lead to radical new ways to understand and to resolve different social or political problems, lie at the heart of ancient and modern debates over the value of democratic government. [p295]
The irony of Hayek’s stance is that he, perhaps more than any other 20th century economist, perhaps any economist in history – was the first economist to realize an important point about the fragility of expert knowledge. He even gave his Nobel acceptance speech on this topic, entitling it ‘The Pretense of Knowledge’. In this speech and in earlier philosophical essays, Hayek points out that much articulated knowledge represents only peoples’ narrow understanding of reality, and can’t necessarily reflect the whole truth of a situation, much of which lies beyond the grasp of individual consciousness... But he was also certain, with a sort of zealotry that seemed to border on Arendrian ‘pseudo-mysticism’, that markets could perform acts of arbitration and decision making far better than humans ever could. ... Even right wing economists who had helped to push the University of Chicago’s economics department into new, pro-market directions over the 1940s and 1950s grew irritated by Hayek’s wilful blindness to the same market ‘distorting’ activity that Hayek would loudly attack whenever it hailed from the public sector or a labour union. [p299, 300]
People don’t need enlightenment now: they have it already, bearing witness to injustices happening in plain sight. They need accountability now. [p307]
Oracular power – the ability to speak believably about the boundaries of ignorance and knowledge – tends in practice to be controlled by people in positions of political or economic leverage who are able to espouse a narrow history that reinforces the inevitability of a future they wish to create. When challengers point this out, the dominant goup often reacts violently, even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true. [p313]
The inalienable nature of human ignorance is emancipatory because it furnishes for all the ability to question the wisdom of the few. [p317]
It is the courage of the unsilent that pierces the alibi of the few, making an ignorance alibi untenable in the long term. [p321]
Linsey McGoey is a sociologist trained at the LSE and based now at Essex University. Her research material combines qualitative interview methods with investigative reporting and she brings in relevant material from academic literature and the history of ideas. Despite its obvious political implications, the book does strive to be open minded about its subject, which is to explore diverse ways in which public affairs are shaped by ignorance, both by accident and by design, and she considers the possibility that there are at least some merits as well as many important problems arising from this. In particular, in the face of awesome disparities of power, the persistent and unavoidable ignorance of our governing elites opens up many opportunities for effective social and political action. She strives to not be a doom merchant.
Many individuals, groups and public bodies deploy strategic ignorance as a way to secure desired goals and exclude unwanted frustrations. Refusal to collect statistics, for instance, obstructs informed public debate and legal scrutiny of some government policies. An over optimistic dependence on statistics and scientific evidence, on the other hand, as in the Utilitarian movement of 19th century England, does not necessarily protect us. Pharmaceutical companies infamously conceal inconvenient research findings, or fail to investigate issues of concern, while promoting research with convenient findings based on deceptive premises, to protect the often immense profitability of drugs despite their known, severely harmful effects. In an interesting chapter, McGoey explores the legal complexity of wilful ignorance and its many tricky nuances enabling corporations and their executives to evade accountability.
In the history of ideas, McGoey explores the suppression of critical information, either by ignoring major historical realities (such as the extent of state aid and protectionism in the 19th century era of so called free markets), editing out inconvenient material from the works of a writer like JS Mill, (who inconveniently credited his wife and daughter with joint authorship of his work), or by promoting edited versions of larger works that systematically exclude major sections in order to distort what we know of that work (as in the general ignorance of academics as well as the public about what Adam Smith really believed and said about the role of government in the largely unknown Volume 5 of his Wealth of Nations).
The latter issue also illustrates a larger problem, which is that those who express anger at the ignorance of the average voter and propose that only the more educated and affluent in the community should be allowed to vote, seem unable to imagine that the educated are often deluded in their shared beliefs or that the affluent are the beneficiaries of luck, with no valid evidence of greater average intelligence or wisdom. They forget also that the ignorance of the voters is the successful outcome of the way elites organise our affairs, and voter ignorance is a massive resource on which the elite depends for their own prosperity. They may mock it but they cannot survive without it.
This book is filled with lively and sometimes eye opening examples and anecdotes of the central role ignorance plays in our lives. Very little ignorance is the product of stupidity as such. Indeed, the greatest intellects are too often credited with wisdom in areas outside their special expertise, in which they not only know no more than the average citizen, but often are too arrogant to notice their own ignorance, while we are too easily confused into failing to point it out. As we despair at the ignorance of our elites, and rage at their promotion of ignorance, our last best hope may still rest in the secure knowledge that our elites are themselves ignorant and often plain wrong in many of their core beliefs.
What remains to achieve, of course, is that we choose not to be deceived. I have not abandoned Isiah Berlin’s aphorism just yet.
Quotes
‘General elections are always dismal affairs,’ the British economist John Maynard Keynes complained of the 1931 national elections, ‘but I do not think I remember any election in which more outrageous lies were told by leading statesmen.’ [p31]
...a point J.S.Mill made of Bentham: ‘There is hardly anything in Bentham’s philosophy which is not true. The bad part of his writings is his resolute denial of all that he does not see, of all truths but those which he recognises.’ [p37]
Ford had spent years presiding over the dissemination of anti-Semitic lies through his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent... Ford’s editors then bundled up op-eds from Dearborn Independent into a book, The International Jew, translated into dozens of languages. ... ‘The younger generation looked with envy to the symbols of success and prosperity like Henry Ford,’ commented a leader of the Nazi Students’ Federation. ‘And if Henry Ford said that the Jews were to blame, why, naturaly we believed him.’ .... William Allen White, a Pulitzer-winning author ... offered this remark: ‘It is a sad commentary on humanity that Ford’s great wealth has not revealed his ignorance, his mental sloth, and his incapacity to think. Man is always inclined to feel that greatness in one field of activity presumes greatness in all activities.” [p79-81]
‘One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don’t be the first guy through the door because you’re going to get all the arrows,’ [Stephen] Bannon said. ‘If it’s junk bonds, let Michael Milken lead the way.’ He added that one of Goldman’s strongest principles is ‘never lead in any product. Find a business partner.’ It’s a doctrine of deliberate anti-visibility: the strategic effort to makes one's ideas seem to have originated elsewhere to avoid the appearance of primary involvement. It’s a tactic for camouflaging one’s direct complicity through complex partnership structures. It’s a way to manufacture ignorance alibis. [p87]
Holding up Trump rather than, say, Barack Obama or George W. Bush as poster representatives of elite ignorance trivialises the problem of useful ignorance... It may be immoral but there’s nothing unusual about Trump’s willingness to lie or feign ignorance to protect himself and his wealth and political power... Trump gained his business degree from Wharton. Stephen Bannon got his MBA from Harvard. Both these men clearly benefitted from an ‘elite’ education. If they were tested on their political knowledge, there’s a very good chance they would pass the test – but this doesn’t mean that America would be better off with more Bannons in charge. [p93]
[Adam] Smith argues that merchants have a knack – sometimes dishonestly so and sometimes out of innocent error – for tricking other groups, including legislators, into believing that the merchants’ interest is the same as the public interest. Smith advises his readers against falling for this error. ‘The interests of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade and manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the publick.’... ‘any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till being long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the publick, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the publick, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it ... The masters, being fewer in number, can combine more easily and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit their combination, while it prohibits that of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.’ ... ‘We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters; though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.’ [p140-142]
But even allowing for an editor’s prerogative, though, the editing of Wealth of Nations during the 20th Century must still surely stand out as one of the most brazen knowledge heists in modern scholarship, with certain editions wilfully cutting out the entirety of Book 5. Titled ‘The Revenue of the Sovereign of the Commonwealth, ’ it is in this book- the longest of all five books in Wealth of Nations – that Smith details his arguments about the appropriate role of government in a market economy. ... when multiple versions omit the same book, it amounts to a pattern of wilful omission. The deliberate cutting of sections where Smith writes at length about the necessity of government intervention is an example of what I mean by elite ignorance, because it proves that what people today don't know about Smith isn’t simply accidental. [p144,145] ...It is ignorance born from too much narrow knowledge rather than simply a lack of information. And also, importantly, this example shows that it tends to be outsiders who lack specialist knowledge about a topic who can spot anomalies with a historical record. [p146]
In her rebuttal to Burke, she [Mary Wollstonecraft] is one of the first modern writers to articulate the problem known today as confirmation bias, the favouring of facts that support earlier assumptions. ‘When we read a book that supports our favourite opinions, how eagerly do we suck in the doctrine,’ she writes, ‘But when, on the contrary, we peruse a skilful writer, with whom we do not coincide in opinion, how attentive is the mind to detect fallacy.’ Everyone does it, she emphasizes, but Burke’s problem is that he doesn’t realize he does it. [p151]
Libraries are filled with studies of knowledge production, but the study of ignorance production is in its infancy. [p168]
‘[Rousseau] never spoke more truly than when he said: it takes a great deal of scientific insight to discern the facts that are closest to us.’ George Orwell reiterated the point when he famously observed: ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’ [p168]
My examples may seem like a scattered grouping, but they are chosen for their very eclecticisim, to show the way that patterns of strategic ignorance can be seen in many different areas of social and economic life. [p225]
The realization that people can be blinded by their own narrow expertise, and also the flipside of this problem, the fact that peoples’ individual experience can often lead to radical new ways to understand and to resolve different social or political problems, lie at the heart of ancient and modern debates over the value of democratic government. [p295]
The irony of Hayek’s stance is that he, perhaps more than any other 20th century economist, perhaps any economist in history – was the first economist to realize an important point about the fragility of expert knowledge. He even gave his Nobel acceptance speech on this topic, entitling it ‘The Pretense of Knowledge’. In this speech and in earlier philosophical essays, Hayek points out that much articulated knowledge represents only peoples’ narrow understanding of reality, and can’t necessarily reflect the whole truth of a situation, much of which lies beyond the grasp of individual consciousness... But he was also certain, with a sort of zealotry that seemed to border on Arendrian ‘pseudo-mysticism’, that markets could perform acts of arbitration and decision making far better than humans ever could. ... Even right wing economists who had helped to push the University of Chicago’s economics department into new, pro-market directions over the 1940s and 1950s grew irritated by Hayek’s wilful blindness to the same market ‘distorting’ activity that Hayek would loudly attack whenever it hailed from the public sector or a labour union. [p299, 300]
People don’t need enlightenment now: they have it already, bearing witness to injustices happening in plain sight. They need accountability now. [p307]
Oracular power – the ability to speak believably about the boundaries of ignorance and knowledge – tends in practice to be controlled by people in positions of political or economic leverage who are able to espouse a narrow history that reinforces the inevitability of a future they wish to create. When challengers point this out, the dominant goup often reacts violently, even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true. [p313]
The inalienable nature of human ignorance is emancipatory because it furnishes for all the ability to question the wisdom of the few. [p317]
It is the courage of the unsilent that pierces the alibi of the few, making an ignorance alibi untenable in the long term. [p321]
April 28, 2021
very nice easy and fun read from Left Book Club
not totally convinced by like , the thoroughness or radicalness of the framework / conclusions (though I appreciated the optimism) but I learned a lot !!!!
not totally convinced by like , the thoroughness or radicalness of the framework / conclusions (though I appreciated the optimism) but I learned a lot !!!!
January 7, 2026
'It is inaccurate to suggest that concern over indigenous rights is merely a recent phenomenon, but many people, including celebrated scholars, do still argue this position. What renders their view of the past compelling is not the scope of their gaze but the convenience of their narrowness. To maintain that narrowness, believers must choose not to explore or admit facts that could destabilize a narrative they wish to see as inalterable. They must become masters of the unknown.'
I recently joined The Left Book Club and Linsey McGoey's The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World was the book for April 2021. In the book, McGoey explores how ignorance is a common trait in all of us, with many different facets. When we think of ignorance, we tend to think of uneducated, uninformed people who are unknowingly incorrect in their assumptions about a certain topic. But what about wilful ignorance? What about corporations, and public entities, which are not only ignorant themselves, but go on to disseminate that ignorance to their populations? Thus ignorance become cyclical, and those who try to break the cycle are vilified.
It is precisely these scenarios that McGoey explores, providing evidence from mostly the US and the UK to support her statements. Her arguments are compelling, annotated and well resourced. She covers many different areas of life, from academia, pharmaceuticals and politics. Admittedly, the two chapters of pharmaceuticals did make me quite skeptical of the industry at large. It seems increasingly unlikely to me, that corporations serve any purpose under capitalism beyond growth at all costs - even when the cost is human life, or the quality of it. Additionally, the text at large has me questioning institutions I'd once thought of as 'politically neutral'. Now, I'm questioning whether such one can truly be politically neutral. Everything is political, and all these institutions are made up of people, who have their own political views, and also the institutional power to spread them.
Some of McGoey's arguments are from recent events in the UK news cycle, which was interesting to read about in an academic context. She discusses the toppling of statues and Black Lives Matter protests, and how the discomfort from the white, ruling class was not so much about the statues themselves - but about ownership over history. We see the same argument with arguments over Churchill as a war-hero or a racist (he can be both), and perceived political bias in universities. There didn't seem to be much uproar when the Department of Education banned 'anti-capitalist' texts from schools. The argument is over control over whose history is seen as legitimate, and whose is dismissed. The tides are changing, and the governments know it. It's encouraging to see.
McGoey avoids strictly subscribing to any one political ideology, and by her own admission, feels that the solution does not belong solely to the left or right school of thought, which I can appreciate. She does offer some solutions to the problems she presents, which is commendable, for many critical texts avoid this step. It was validating for McGoey to point out how the working class are disproportionately blamed for their ignorance, when the ruling classes are just as much so, with the added disgrace of having immediate, direct access to information. Ignorance is not a case of 'both sides' being equally at fault.
McGoey ends her quite critical text on a uplifting note, that throughout history, the situations always shifts, and the oppressed always rise. Ignorance as a strategy is unstable, and increasingly relied upon by the powers that be in order to maintain themselves, but the masses will always strive for independence and the exertion of free-will, which ultimately permeates change, whether it takes decades or centuries.
January 25, 2023
I'm so split about this book. I think it had important things to say and chunks of it were quite engrossing. I learned a lot that I was quite shocked by, particularly regarding intentionally suppressed writings of major enlightenment thinkers.
However, I know the author is quite proud of coining new terms and turns of phrase for this subject, and I get this is a book with quite the academic bent, but I found all that insufferable and more confusing than if she had just made her point with more extant terminology. I also thought some points were sort of meaninglessly abstract and over-worded.
My main take away?
1) Those in power use plausible deniability to get away with a LOT and convince us of their good character- while also claiming superior knowledge to dismiss the demands and testimonies of the working class and marginalized. This serves to protect existing institutions.
2) much of history has been intentionally suppressed or erased to serve narratives that benefit those in power
3) acknowledging that we know so little as a collective species, and far, far less as individuals- particularly in comparison to what there is left for us to discover and discern- enables the masses to refute claims of superiority by the ruling class. It's a tool to dismantle acceptance of hierarchy.
It would have been easier to extract that meaning without a lot of rambling about strongs and smarts and whatnot. I didn't find those to be useful distinctions.
Frankly the best and most communicative parts of the book were examining corporate fraud, regulatory failures, and suppressed texts directly from well known philosophers.
I think this book would find a wider audience if it tried to be less scholarly and just let the reader get the point from the evidence presented- that's what I wound up doing anyways, and I'm not entirely a stranger to sociologists' writing.
However, I know the author is quite proud of coining new terms and turns of phrase for this subject, and I get this is a book with quite the academic bent, but I found all that insufferable and more confusing than if she had just made her point with more extant terminology. I also thought some points were sort of meaninglessly abstract and over-worded.
My main take away?
1) Those in power use plausible deniability to get away with a LOT and convince us of their good character- while also claiming superior knowledge to dismiss the demands and testimonies of the working class and marginalized. This serves to protect existing institutions.
2) much of history has been intentionally suppressed or erased to serve narratives that benefit those in power
3) acknowledging that we know so little as a collective species, and far, far less as individuals- particularly in comparison to what there is left for us to discover and discern- enables the masses to refute claims of superiority by the ruling class. It's a tool to dismantle acceptance of hierarchy.
It would have been easier to extract that meaning without a lot of rambling about strongs and smarts and whatnot. I didn't find those to be useful distinctions.
Frankly the best and most communicative parts of the book were examining corporate fraud, regulatory failures, and suppressed texts directly from well known philosophers.
I think this book would find a wider audience if it tried to be less scholarly and just let the reader get the point from the evidence presented- that's what I wound up doing anyways, and I'm not entirely a stranger to sociologists' writing.
August 10, 2021
Maybe I wasn’t quite the target audience for this one, but I found it pretty dry and convoluted, hard to follow the core arguments. I hate to rate a book 2 stars but I honestly couldn’t wait to be finished with this one.
That being said — the conclusion is a particularly strong chapter of writing, and moved me so much I considered upping my rating of the book. There was definitely some interesting / thought provoking stuff in here, just…hard to find/track in my opinion.
That being said — the conclusion is a particularly strong chapter of writing, and moved me so much I considered upping my rating of the book. There was definitely some interesting / thought provoking stuff in here, just…hard to find/track in my opinion.
June 2, 2025
This seems to be an attempt to not define 'ignorance' - the author states that if it is defined, it will cease to exist(?) but there is no explanation of what absolute truth is being hidden by ignorance. Everyone uses 'ignorance', even this author, rendering the result an outpouring of hyperbolic opinion. The subject as defined is too broad and no argument tethered.
Wildly swapping from time periods and geography in a paragraph, no discussion of power relations or motive (look at the index for the lack of academic references to authors), no discussion of motive. No question of the capitalist definition of wealth - that is, who controls the popular narrative.
There is no need for this book or the attempt to create a field of study as power relations have been much better covered elsewhere, without conflating not knowing with lying with propaganda. The use of the term 'fake news' shows its incompetence, there is not definition of the term or attempt to explain how it is used to denigrate the truth to promote a particular type of propaganda.
On wealth there are attacks on Ford for his racism but nothing on Gates for his buying governments an both abused workers on a daily basis.
The discussion of current politics lacks any historical context of the political and financial restructuring of the pat 50 years that affects all advanced industrial states.
There is a discussion of the internet but nothing on the proliferation of pamphlet publishing during the 19th Century (which was taxed and outlawed throughout the world because of its threat to the State). A chapter is spent on Murdoch but no mention of how politicians must report to him for permission to run for office nor changes to UK and USA law to allow his media empire growth. Wikilieaks is not mentioned for exposing the media corruption.
On war, it quotes recent lies from the US without mentioning how the English (home of the author) helped create the lies. Nor is there any mention of the British Empire or its post 1945 imperial wars that were all based on propaganda - including the murder of political groups in colonial territories (by extension the BBC and other media outlets promoting UK imperialism); for the US, I would have expected some mention of Vietnam where every dead body was counted as an enemy soldier.
A long section on economics would have been better use with a comparison with the East India Company and recent wars for oil and raw materials by the west.
The 'ignorance' discussed seems to be a poor relative to the work of Foucault, Husserl, Nietzche, Chomsky etc of how the State must be defended. No discussion of the few dozen people and corporations that control 80% of the print and broadcast media.
This does not follow any dictionary definition of ignorance, rather it is a low grade attempt to create a field of study that obfuscates not clarify.
Wildly swapping from time periods and geography in a paragraph, no discussion of power relations or motive (look at the index for the lack of academic references to authors), no discussion of motive. No question of the capitalist definition of wealth - that is, who controls the popular narrative.
There is no need for this book or the attempt to create a field of study as power relations have been much better covered elsewhere, without conflating not knowing with lying with propaganda. The use of the term 'fake news' shows its incompetence, there is not definition of the term or attempt to explain how it is used to denigrate the truth to promote a particular type of propaganda.
On wealth there are attacks on Ford for his racism but nothing on Gates for his buying governments an both abused workers on a daily basis.
The discussion of current politics lacks any historical context of the political and financial restructuring of the pat 50 years that affects all advanced industrial states.
There is a discussion of the internet but nothing on the proliferation of pamphlet publishing during the 19th Century (which was taxed and outlawed throughout the world because of its threat to the State). A chapter is spent on Murdoch but no mention of how politicians must report to him for permission to run for office nor changes to UK and USA law to allow his media empire growth. Wikilieaks is not mentioned for exposing the media corruption.
On war, it quotes recent lies from the US without mentioning how the English (home of the author) helped create the lies. Nor is there any mention of the British Empire or its post 1945 imperial wars that were all based on propaganda - including the murder of political groups in colonial territories (by extension the BBC and other media outlets promoting UK imperialism); for the US, I would have expected some mention of Vietnam where every dead body was counted as an enemy soldier.
A long section on economics would have been better use with a comparison with the East India Company and recent wars for oil and raw materials by the west.
The 'ignorance' discussed seems to be a poor relative to the work of Foucault, Husserl, Nietzche, Chomsky etc of how the State must be defended. No discussion of the few dozen people and corporations that control 80% of the print and broadcast media.
This does not follow any dictionary definition of ignorance, rather it is a low grade attempt to create a field of study that obfuscates not clarify.
October 23, 2023
Current Affairs
How Bill Gates Makes the World Worse Off
McGoey came on the Current Affairs podcast with editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the career of Gates, the problems with billionaire charity, and the reasons philanthrocapitalists often escape serious criticism.
They also discuss Prof. McGoey’s work in the field of “ignorance studies.”
In The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules The World, McGoey studies the way institutions carefully exclude ideologically inconvenient information, creating a kind of useful ignorance. This interview has been edited and condensed for grammar and clarity.
When you published your book on the Gates Foundation, No Such Thing As a Free Gift, back in 2015, there wasn’t much criticism at all of the Gates Foundation. There was really a sense that they could do no wrong. Now, with some of Bill Gates’s actions surrounding vaccinations and COVID, and his very public divorce and personal scandals, some of the shine has come off the Gates Foundation.
It’s an interesting sociological question to try to understand how Bill Gates went from being a hero to a villain in such a short time span. In the general public, it was generally assumed that to give money away to any cause was a good thing. But for people who come from a socialist background, people who are anti-capitalist, there was concern about the idea that you could link the realms of philanthropy and capitalism in the manner that Mr. Gates was proposing to link them.
The idea that Gates was a defender of the rights and the entitlements of people who are most disenfranchised by circulations of global capital is simply a ludicrous proposition.
So when it came to the general public, my criticisms of Mr. Gates might have been surprising, but in some of the left-wing circles that I hung out in that I had been involved in for over a decade before I began to research the Gates Foundation more directly, my criticism was not that surprising.
It was a bit outlandish to assume that Mr. Gates, chief monopolist, was somehow going to be a defender of the rights of the poor, and someone who could close the global inequality gaps.
In reality, he was really at the forefront of helping to perpetuate inequality through his approach to labor contracts and through his approach to patent protections.
Ouch!
January 15, 2021
One can "also argue that human beings are equal unknowers. We are all unknowers in two important respects. First, in the noun sense of the word. Each of us is an unknower because, obvivously, no one is omniscient. And secondly, in the verb sense of the word, we all equally unknow: our actions are enabled and rationalized through unceasing processes of ignoring, through a necessarily selective engagement with knowledge around us."
It is this ability to selectively (willfully, strategically) ignore things that allows corporations from acting ethically (moral hazard of plausible deniability); allows politicians to foment unrest for partisan advantages; and allows us to manage our cognitive dissonance between our values and our actions.
The Unknowers is an interesting book that illumines what many (maybe everybody at times?) would like to be left in the shadows. Her solution is to continue to make a efforts 'unknow' - that is, to reexamine what we think we know. It brings to mind a quote by Mark Twain: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so."
It is this ability to selectively (willfully, strategically) ignore things that allows corporations from acting ethically (moral hazard of plausible deniability); allows politicians to foment unrest for partisan advantages; and allows us to manage our cognitive dissonance between our values and our actions.
The Unknowers is an interesting book that illumines what many (maybe everybody at times?) would like to be left in the shadows. Her solution is to continue to make a efforts 'unknow' - that is, to reexamine what we think we know. It brings to mind a quote by Mark Twain: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so."
December 16, 2023
Great essay that offers some useful concepts such as 'strategic ignorance' (that is more often employed by the rich and powerful), 'oracular power' (the capacity to determine where the boundary between knowledge and ignorance lies'), ... The discussions of political philosophy were sometimes a bit much but the part about the legal implications of where the boundary lies of what can be considered wilful ignorance or culpable ignorance were very interesting. Overall, a clear structure and writing style tied this essay well together.
May 13, 2021
Found through the Left Book Club
A good indepth analysis of the power of strategic ignorance following the purposeful misinterpretation of theory, history and politics throughout the last 300 years
Although not very radical (I felt presented with 300 years worth of structural problems and no solution) it was definitely a good read.
A good indepth analysis of the power of strategic ignorance following the purposeful misinterpretation of theory, history and politics throughout the last 300 years
Although not very radical (I felt presented with 300 years worth of structural problems and no solution) it was definitely a good read.
February 25, 2022
OMG! YES! YES!
The Book was absolutely Breathtaking!
I am inspired!
I WAS INSPIRED TO DEATH!
To the Author of this
absolute treasure read.
Linsey McGoey
Where is your Father
Steve McGoey hiding
Hmm?
You can reach me
at 780 280 6868
My Name Ray
And I live upstairs
from you
Because I'm your neighbor
Thank you.
The Book was absolutely Breathtaking!
I am inspired!
I WAS INSPIRED TO DEATH!
To the Author of this
absolute treasure read.
Linsey McGoey
Where is your Father
Steve McGoey hiding
Hmm?
You can reach me
at 780 280 6868
My Name Ray
And I live upstairs
from you
Because I'm your neighbor
Thank you.
January 19, 2025
Really thought-provoking and goes into a lot of depth!
January 19, 2026
Excellent book 5/5
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