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“Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was”, the creature in Frankenstein utters, summarizing one of the core themes in Mary Shelley’s novel. The meaning is inescapable for the hapless being: Knowledge is not always desired. The question is whether that could apply to us all and why.

Let me confess it right away: Knowledge is something I am nearly obsessed about. That is, I feel very stressed if I don’t know something, and much calmer if I do, even if it’s knowledge of something unpleasant. If someone asked me “There’s good news and bad news, do you prefer…” I’d interrupt them with “Oh, spit it out all together already!”

However, I also have enough life experience (a milder way of saying I’m becoming a grumpy old man) to know that this approach doesn’t necessarily apply to others. People like self-deception.

The truth is, we intuitively might think knowledge is always desired, we might even affirm so if asked, but things are more complex than that.

“Knowledge Is Always Desired” Is a Philosophical Position

What could be a reason we might profess knowledge is always desired yet our actions don’t follow suit?

To say that knowledge is always desired is a philosophical statement, largely separate from social and psychological factors. In other words, if you asked person A whether, generally speaking, it’s good to know about thing X, they’d likely say “yes”, unless it affects them personally, directly (a psychological factor) or indirectly (a social factor).

I can give you a real-life example to see how far people can go denying knowledge (literally, apognosis) in order to avoid facing inconvenience: Once, seeing the contents of my mother’s shopping cart, I told her: “If I tell you what’s in that processed food you bought, you won’t eat it again”. Her response? “No, no! Don’t tell me, or I won’t be able to eat it again!”

Knowledge not Always Desired: Psychological Factors

The example above shows when knowledge becomes undesired as a result of psychological factors. In other words, my mother was so unwilling to change her habits that she preferred to hide her head in the sand and pretend nothing was wrong just because she didn’t know anything was wrong.

The results of knowledge here are direct, having to do with one’s ability to handle the truth. As such, knowledge is undesirable because it has an effect that is entirely psychological in nature.

I mean, anyone could clearly understand that not knowing that food X contains this much saturated fat doesn’t change their accumulation in one’s body. Denying the knowledge is nothing more than pretending you don’t have to act on it – in this example, going through the inconvenient process of finding a substitute, exercising, or overall opting for a different lifestyle.

But how about if one can’t change something? Is there merit in still knowing?

Legitimate Reasons to Withholding Knowledge

Recently, while reading about various Apollo missions, I discovered there were times when information, knowledge about something, wasn’t given to the crew. Besides occasions where information was withheld simply to limit their workload, there were some “special cases”, like Apollo 13, where pessimistic assessments for things the crew couldn’t do anything about were withheld.

I’m (obviously) not an astronaut, nor do I have any kind of expertise useful in the context. I only represent myself, an average layperson, when I say that I would prefer to know, even if it were pessimistic news.

Nonetheless, I can also clearly understand the merit of not being told. When there are thousands of actions to undertake in a hostile, unpredictable environment, in a situation far from the usual scenarios trained for, any piece of knowledge that doesn’t serve the mission shouldn’t be allowed to negative impact functions for psychological reasons.

Knowledge not Always Desired: Social Factors

Sometimes – perhaps often – we question whether knowledge is always desired as a result of social factors. That is, knowing something won’t affect us directly, but it can either affect us indirectly or affect others; society at large.

The most typical example for this category is the advent of nuclear weapons.

The regrets and overall ethical problems surrounding the development of the atomic bomb are well documented. Essentially, this is a Frankenstein problem: Is there knowledge that, though accessible, should be left alone because it might have catastrophic consequences – whether directly or indirectly?

The atomic bomb is a clear example of direct consequences: There was the intention to acquire knowledge to make a powerful weapon. An example of indirect consequences – indeed, one we currently grapple with – is that of artificial intelligence.

There are people who fear – not entirely in jest – that developing a very powerful AI can turn out to be an extinction event. Should we ignore knowledge just to be on the safe side? I’ll offer my views in the next, concluding section.

Knowledge Is Often not a Matter of Choice

In 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt warning him that the Nazis are working on a mega-weapon, the atomic bomb, essentially paving the way for the Manhattan project. Fast forward 6 years later, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Einstein said “Woe is me”, later adding: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing”.

Hindsight is a bitch – if I may be a bit blunt and informal.

That’s the problem with knowledge and technology: You can’t ethically assess something new and ground-breaking before it exists. Not fully, at least.

Ultimately, knowledge is not a matter of choice, especially when it comes to “serious” knowledge, that has far-reaching consequences. Technological advancement cannot be stopped. At best, it can be regulated and assessed carefully.

As for knowledge on the individual level, working in a psychological framework? I’d say its conscious acceptance can be postponed: You can certainly pretend drinking heavily, eating processed foods, or smoking isn’t bad for you. You can even convince your conscious self that it really is so, by refusing to accept knowledge of all the evidence. Yet your subconscious will know and, sooner or later, your body will inevitably become privy to this postponed knowledge, by paying the price.