You Say You Know But You Don’t Really Know

This is the best thing. I read it twice because, I told myself, I needed to. And later I’m going to read it aloud to my children, because if there is something that children are subject to, just like all the rest of us, it is the deeply held belief that they know how to do all the stuff already.

In fact, I recently banned those two small words, “I Know,” from my household. No child is allowed to say to me, “I know.” They can say, “yes ma’am” and “ok” and “yes,” but they can’t say “I know.” They cannot say it because they like to say it so much. It is always the thing that comes out of the mouth first, even before thought has occurred. It goes down this way.

Child wanders into trashed kitchen. Mother stares at child in disbelief because she said already, clearly and slowly, “Do not leave the kitchen until all the rice crispies are swept up off the floor and the counter has been scrubbed bright and clean so that ants don’t feel the deep calling unto the deep to come and remove the stickiness of the milk that has been lathered all over everywhere, lapping it up with their little ant mouths and sending their organized and competent little signals to all the other ants to come and enjoy the Promise Land.” But see, the child did leave the kitchen. The child ate the bowl of rice crispies, pouring buckets of sugar over a food that is essentially, in its true nature, comprised of sugar already, like if you converted the rice crispy into what it actually is, you would find that it is basically a quarter cup of sugar, but the child felt it wasn’t enough, and put more sugar all over it, but then didn’t feel like drinking the milk, and so plunked the bowl down in the sink, sloshing milk everywhere, not worrying himself to rinse the bowl and put it in the dishwasher which was sitting there, wide open, all inviting, because no one thought they would close it up, no one, so that anyone walking by would definitely bash herself in the shins, more than once, and then the child wandered away, and so you, the mother, say,

“Why did you leave the kitchen? I said that you should not leave the kitchen until you had completely–that is, all the way to completion–cleaned up after yourself.”

And the child says, and I quote, “I know.”

And then what you do is you clench your teeth and say, “Clearly you did not know. If you knew, you would have not walked out of the kitchen. The thing that you do not appear to possess is knowledge. So don’t ever ever ever say that you know.”

The child stares at the mother in wide-eyed wonder and asks himself what her problem is, why is she so worked up?

The only remedy for the Dunning-Kruger effect, although the suggestions at the end of the article are excellent, is the Holy Spirit. You think I’m kidding, but really I’m not. The trouble with all of us isn’t that think we know when we don’t know, the trouble is that we think we are, in point of fact, god. I must be the supreme judge of all reality. That’s what I know best about myself. It is the knowledge I hold most dear. I am more than happy to say to God and literally everybody else, “I know.”

It takes God himself, in the person of the Holy Spirit, bashing his way into my heart and mind to put stop to all the madness. He moves in and says–and many people do feel like this experience is so profound that they would describe it as an audible voice, although it can’t be because the person standing next to you as you survey the wreckage of your life can’t usually hear it–“You Do Not In Fact Know,” and also, “That was wrong and bad,” and occasionally, “Stop It.”

If you are a Christian and you haven’t heard this from God, what with reading the Bible all the time and being with other Christians, and praying and stuff, I, out of the depths of my profound expertise, want to suggest that you are doing it wrong. You cannot possibly be right all the time. And if you are a Christian engaged in the ordinary disciplines of the Christian life, which you should be because you need them–you cannot possibly live without a spiritual breath (that would be prayer) and spiritual food (reading the Bible, studying it with other people, listening attentively to a decent sermon at least once a week, getting up out of your pew and toddling down the aisle to eat the piece of bread and sip the wine, joining, as it were, yourself not more with yourself, but with the one who is actually God) and the fellowship of believers who should be allowed to tell you when you’re wrong–is this sentence going on too long? If you are a Christian engaged in the ordinary disciplines of the Christian life, God is going to have lots of opportunity to let you know who you really are and how much you really know.

The word we are groping around for in the dark is Humility. It’s such a great thing. Literally the entire world would be better if we all had some. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must retire to the kitchen to impart wisdom, knowledge, and understanding to those people who are there right this moment eating rice crispies. Tinkerty Tonk.