Ignorance and Freedom Can not Coexist
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Thomas Jefferson understood what most people ignore today: Freedom demands a price: knowledge.
Tyrants across history have weaponized ignorance for one reason: educated people argue. Ignorant people obey.
They play whack-a-mole with control: When one tactic fails, they switch to another. Ban knowledge, then deceive, then outright lie. That pattern leaves us with one choice today.
IGNORANCE IS A CAGE
You can’t claim rights you can’t recognize. Benjamin Rush nailed it: ignorance isn’t a gap, it’s a cage.
“Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights.”
Rush continued, noting that knowledge has to be widespread. When it’s hoarded by a few, this is freedom denied to the rest. Liberty can’t survive behind locked doors or under intellectual gatekeepers.
“Where learning is confined to a few people, liberty can be neither equal nor universal.”
Rush quoted Cesare Beccaria to expose what tyrants fear most: people who know too much.
“When the clouds of ignorance are dispelled by the radiance of knowledge, authority trembles.”
Every tyranny needs a foundation. St. George Tucker identified it: ignorance.
“The ignorance of the people is the footstool of despotism.”
Thomas Paine saw the pattern: ignorant people obey. They “trust the experts” who gladly tell them what to do.
“Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”
Ignorance this widespread isn’t accidental, it’s strategy. Samuel Adams called it what it is: a weapon to keep people blind.
“It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice.”
KNOWLEDGE BREEDS OPPOSITION
In the early 17th Century, Sir Francis Bacon exposed why tyrants hate real education. Knowledge breeds opposition to power.
“It introduces a relaxation in government, as every man is more ready to argue than obey.”
Bacon reached back to Plutarch for proof this fear is ancient. Cato the Elder saw a visiting Greek philosopher and panicked. Not a diplomat, a threat. He convinced the senate to expel him immediately.
“Whence Cato the censor—when Carneades came ambassador to Rome, and the young Romans, allured with his eloquence, flocked about him—gave counsel in open senate, to grant him his despatch immediately.”
Why? Cato’s fear wasn’t that Carneades was wrong – it was that he made people think. And thinking people just might not like their government.
“Lest he should infect the minds of the youth, and insensibly occasion an alteration in the State.”
THE MECHANISM: FEUDAL LAW
That was Ancient Rome. In 1765, John Adams wrote about what came after.
He examined over 1000 years of European history from the 5th century through the mid-16th century and identified how tyranny maintained itself across the continent through ignorance.
“They have accordingly laboured, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter.”
The mechanism? Feudal law – which, as Adams pointed out – was implemented everywhere.
“Adopted by almost all the princes of Europe, and wrought into the constitutions of their government.”
The result? Controlled education: enough knowledge to be a useful servant, not enough to rebel.
“In this manner, the common people were held together, in herds and clans, in a state of servile dependance on their lords; bound, even by the tenure of their lands to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars; and in a state of total ignorance of every thing divine and human, excepting the use of arms, and the culture of their lands.”
But that kind of forced, widespread ignorance couldn’t last forever. As Adams pointed out, knowledge eventually spread.
“From the time of the reformation, to the first settlement of America, knowledge gradually spread in Europe, but especially in England; and in proportion as that increased and spread among the people, ecclesiastical and civil tyranny, which I use as synonimous expressions, for the cannon and feudal laws, seem to have lost their strength and weight.”
WHACK-A-MOLE
The more people learned, the more tyrants had to adapt. So, as John Locke pointed out, they shifted to a propaganda-style approach where they kept the truth hidden.
“Thus learned ignorance, and this art of keeping, even inquisitive men, from true knowledge, hath been propagated in the world, and hath much perplexed whilst it pretended to inform the understanding.”
And when all else fails? They’ll just lie.
John Dickinson saw this exact pattern at the height of the American Revolution.
“All artful rulers, who strive to extend their power beyond its just limits, endeavor to give to their attempts as much semblance of legality as possible.”
George Washington explained why the lies work: ignorance provides fertile soil for deception to grow.
“Ignorance & design, are difficult to combat. Out of these proceed illiberality, improper jealousies, and a train of evils which oftentimes, in republican governments, must be sorely felt before they can be removed. The former, that is ignorance, being a fit soil for the latter to work in.”
But that’s not the end of the story. Ignorance alone is deadly. Combined with cowardice, it’s fatal. As St. George Tucker pointed out, with that one-two punch, liberty doesn’t stand a chance.
“When ignorance is united with supineness, liberty becomes lethargic, and despotism erects her standard without opposition.”
THE REAL DISGRACE
Here’s the good news. Thomas Paine exposed their fatal weakness: they can never make us ignorant.
“Ignorance is of a peculiar nature: once dispelled, it is impossible to re-establish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.”
That means ignorance is ultimately a choice. The solution, however, isn’t a walk in the park.
Ignorance and obedience – those are easy. Knowledge and freedom? As Abigail Adams wrote, that takes work.
“Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”
Getting the job done won’t be quick and it won’t be easy. We’re all victims of a government-run “education” system. So there’s no shame in starting from scratch.
The real disgrace, as Benjamin Franklin put it, is choosing to stay there.
“Being ignorant is not so much a Shame, as being unwilling to learn.”
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