Each of us.
I have found that “expert” is a very relative term. In a world of blind men, a one eyed man is an expert in sight.
When you are the age of 17, the reservoirs inside yourself (the reservoirs you look at to see how well you are doing in the game of life) are often out of synch.
At 17 years of age, The Reservoir of Knowledge and Understanding (what you KNOW you understand is filled nearly to the brim, and is on the verge of overflowing, and the Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity is virtually empty, with only a few puddles and dampness at the bottom of a cavernous empty tank.
It is a most curious thing.
As I approach my Seventies, I often look inside at those two reservoirs to see how they are faring, and am often disconcerted to realize that the Reservoir of Knowledge and Understanding, the one that was chock full and spilling over the lip decades ago, has dropped its level. And it hasn’t dropped “just a little bit”, it is like opening that milk container and seeing there is just a skim of old, nearly sour milk sloshing around on the bottom. Barely enough to put in your coffee, and if there were enough, you aren’t sure you want to use that remnant of “The Milk of Knowledge” for it. It might be viable, but how can you tell for sure until you put it in your mouth? (mind).
It is deflating. You look at that vast, empty cavern of “The Reservoir of Knowledge”, and wonder if that is really all you ever knew to begin with, or...did the capacity of the reservoir invisibly expand over time because you simply weren’t paying attention and your knowledge level never rose along with it at the same rate?
But when you shift your eyes to look at the “Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity”, you are shocked to see that the reservoir you paid little attention to, the one you laughed at and ignored at the age of 17 when the world was your oyster is threatening to overflow like a clogged toilet with the panic-inducing level rising before your very eyes, screaming at you to take action and prevent the imminent catastrophic spillage.
Where once were scattered puddles of ignorance and some degree of dampness, there now exists a deep, black, and fathomless depth. Looking at it, you have the feeling of being in the cold North Atlantic and the thousands of feet of frigid ocean, instead of looking aquamarine and light, as it would in the warm waters of the Abacos in The Bahamas, it looks malignant, black, foreboding, and impenetrable.
Now, at your advanced age, the “Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity” is the one that seems to be close to spilling over from a lifetime of mistakes and missteps. It seems that just one more thoughtless action, one more pebble of ignorance, one more bit of ignorance thrown into it will cause the the contents to slosh outside of the container, staining it visibly for all to see.
You wonder-is that “Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity” really full of all my ignorance, mistakes, and stupidities uncovered in my life or...did it change size too, while I wasn’t watching?
I know I am not alone in observing the levels of these two pools inside me, “The Reservoir of Knowledge and Understanding” and the “Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity”.
What I believe I have come to understand over time, and it makes it more an instrument of humility than of vexation or terror, is that many of the things you saw at 17 in “The Reservoir of Knowledge and Understanding” didn’t just get in there an stay in there, although many did. Some of your core principles stay in there your whole life. What really happens is that there is an invisible pipe connecting the two reservoirs
“The Reservoir of Knowledge and Understanding” is not static or always being filled. Large portions of the contents of what you are sure you know are continually transferred over to “The Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity”. It just happens so slowly and invisibly that you never perceive it. You learn things. You unlearn those same things, and they pass through that invisible pipe to get deposited in “The Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity”.
But it isn’t that simple. For example, even though at some point in your life you may have a large portion regarding Santa Claus and all that you know about him in your “Reservoir of Knowledge and Understanding”, at some stage (usually early) you discover Santa Claus doesn’t exist in the way you were sure he did. He doesn’t have reindeer, live at the North Pole, deliver all presents to all kids everywhere at the same time, and your letters to Santa went to a dead drawer at The Post Office. So a lot of stuff gets transferred from the “Knowledge” reservoir the “Ignorance and Stupidity” reservoir.
But, as I said...it isn’t a one-to-one transfer. Because even if you transfer that stuff about reindeer and the North Pole out of Knowledge and into Ignorance/Stupidity, you create new things you keep behind.
You know that Santa Claus isn’t real. That goes over to the “Ignorance/Stupidity” reservoir. But you gain the knowledge that Santa Claus has positive meanings to some, so that “new” knowledge stays in the “Knowledge” reservoir.
And conversely, you have things over in the “Ignorance/Stupidity” reservoir that travel imperceptibly, silently, and invisibly from the “Ignorance/Stupidity” side across into the “Knowledge” side through that hidden pipe, and you may dimly recall that at one time, you simply hated Jazz because it was what your father listened to. You were ignorant of it. But as years went on, you understood that there were aspects of things in Jazz that someone was attempting to convey or technical aspects of the performance of it that you learned later in life as you learned to play an instrument yourself, and you came to appreciate jazz.
And you get a transfer from the “Ignorance/Stupidity” reservoir back into the “Knowledge” reservoir, and this transfer is cleaner, because you don’t need to FULLY remember how stupid you were to throw out the Jazz baby with the Jazz bathwater when you were twelve years old.
And so on.
But even still, with these examples, it doesn’t explain fully why, when you are filled with life experiences that your perception of what you know vs. what you don’t know changes so radically.
I think the root of it is that when you see, as you age, how many things you think you knew of but found you did not, you tend to take things wholesale out of the the “The Reservoir of Knowledge and Understanding” and place it, at least for safekeeping, into the “Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity”. It makes the “The Reservoir of Knowledge and Understanding” emptier by comparison and the “Reservoir of Ignorance and Self-Acknowledged Stupidity” more full in the same way.
And so it is in the manner of being an expert on Free Republic (or anywhere else): No matter how good you are at something, no matter how talented you are, no matter the depth of your understanding, there is always someone who is better at it, more talented, and who understands it to deeper levels.
In cases like this, you learn not to regard it as a loss when someone has a better grasp on something than you do, but as something you can gain. You realize you don’t know everything, and have an opportunity to learn something new.
To me, that is the wonderful thing about encountering people on this forum, especially those who know more about things than I do.
To me, I am the blind man, and they are the One-Eyed Man. I simply have to determine if they really do have one-eye that I don’t, or if they are as blind as me and pretending to have that eye.