Socrates

"I only know that I know nothing"

Since my very young age, I heard people talk about how makes one successful and knowledgeable. I was shocked to see people brag about what they know or have heard, even though, often times, the information they were relating was inaccurate, misinterpreted or just wrong.

Soon after, I started to ask myself what is knowledge and what is the best way to learn more. Most people would argue that it is going to school, or college. Maybe some would argue that it is through reading books and watching documentary shows. Other still argue that knowledge and intelligence go hand in hand. None of these answers was satisfactory to me. I figured that knowledge must be a combination of all those things. That led me to become very inquisitive, asking all kinds of questions to just about anyone that I encountered. Most people were bothered by my many questions, but I did not care. I wanted to get as much knowledge as I could. However, the more I learned, the more I realized how much more was there to learn.

When I graduated from High School and went to college, people were congratulating me on my "success". I didn't see it that way. I thanked God for his blessings, but didn't think that finishing school was a success. When I was in College, many people were bragging about what they have learned and how much they know. I have to admit, that at first, I felt that way. After all, I had accomplished much more than most people on Earth will ever accomplish. I could talk about just about any topic forever and argue fervently what I knew. However, pretty soon, my perception of knowledge changed. I went in the library at the university I was attending and realized that my knowledge about the hundreds of topics and articles was dwarfed by the millions of books and articles I haven't read yet. Soon after that, I realized that the only thing that I know for certainty is that I know almost nothing.

This feeling of being so ignorant and minuscule made me loose my self esteem. I started to look at other people as better than me. They knew more than I did. However, the more I got to know these people, the more I realized, they didn't know any more than I did. They might be more experienced or researched in one particular topic. This didn't make them better than I was. Nevertheless, many of those people considered themselves better than me and others just because they were quite familiar with that particular topic or skill, ignoring the fact that they were rather ignorant about hundreds of other topics and skills.

When I would point these issues out, most people accused me of being arrogant. One day, when I read Plato talking about Socrates and realized that he too thought that "I only know that I know nothing", yet he did that thousands of years before I did, I realized that being accused of arrogance for the mere reason of realizing how little we are in this universe and how little we actually know stopped bothering me. For the next few years, we had to learn about Greek philosophy in College and the more I read about Socrates, the more I realized that I am just like he was. His views about logic, ethic, democracy, and the Socratic Method (or as we call it today: the scientific method) matched mine fully.