A meme has been making the rounds, credited (as I saw it) to a Nelson Guedes, regarding “premeditated ignorance.” It is the quality or condition of deliberate unawareness, and I am grateful to Nelson Guedes for putting it about.

Sadly, it sounds all-too similar to the Ingsoc principle (from George Orwell’s 1984) called “crimestop.” Crimestop describes the mental gymnastics–the insanity–required for self-preservation in an authoritarian regime. It means “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, failing to perceive logical errors, of misundertanding the simplest arguments if the are inimical to Ingsoc, and being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.”

As I read the passage above (from the “Goldstein Book” section of 1984), I can’t keep Tucker Carlson’s quisling Labrador face out of my mind. But, loathsome as he is, he’s hardly original, and we’ve seen it before, with the know-nothings of the 1850’s, a lurid brand of Nativists, the McCarthy era, etc. It is conscious, premeditated stupidity. Or as I would term it – willful ignorance. And it is most dangerous when weaponized, together with Aggressive Stupidity.

Ignorance and knowledge exist on a spectrum, bearing the physical-religious qualities of light (and also darkness). I used to joke about it, but events of the last decade have strangled the funny.

At one end of the spectrum lies ignorance. No judgment (necessarily), it merely describes the absence of information.

Ignorance –> Stupidity –> Willful Ignorance –> Aggressive Stupidity

Red – Orange – Yellow – Green – Blue – Indigo – Violet

Beginning with “simple ignorance” (i.e. lack of information), ignorance is judgment-neutral and merely describes a state of (un)knowledge, a kind of dark matter state, glimpsed only indirectly, defined only by what it is NOT.

Further study may reveal that simple ignorance is not dark, but like faint light from a distant galaxy or indeed quantum particles, it may be that we sense something is there; but it could be almost anything, and we can’t describe it or discuss its qualities.

Proceeding along the spectrum, we come to “stupid,” which also describes an (un)knowledgeable state of being. But in this case that state has been changed by exposure to information/knowledge NOT absorbed or acted upon–a lost or discarded (albeit exposed) photo plate, let’s say. This state would include forgetting something previously known or failure to reason inductively based on past information or experience. A kind of petulant entropy.

The third state of ignorance is “willful ignorance.” In this state, painful/inconvenient facts are actively resisted. This is where bullshit comes in, too, giving space to misunderstand–or to claim that everyone else misunderstands. In the bullshit realm, it seems, up is down, and like a black hole, its gravity is so massive and powerful that it sucks in light, even as it continues to emit vast amounts of energy.

The fourth state of ignorance is “aggressive stupidity.” It is by far the most volatile and unstable state, an epistemological supernova. In this white hot state, it’s not enough that painful or inconvenient facts and information be ignored or resisted, but that the regard must be turned outward: facts must be obliterated and shouted down in all caps. Blame must be assigned. The threat of violence is ever-present.

We have seen that the MAGA-hat-faithful will contort themselves with willful ignorance and aggressive stupidity, but we’ve recently found that our billionaires are all-too willing to be Toads for Trump. We might also revisit Graham Greene’s very fine (and very dark) Doctor Fischer of Geneva for a look at the lengths to which the wealthy will go to keep or increase their wealth–and the debasement they are prepared to suffer for it.

The key to sanity in the coming years will be to call out what we see, and not to slip into comfortable, willful ignorance. Because if we begin to go along to get along, to stop questioning, to stop seeing things as they are and stating them plainly, we may quickly find ourselves defending the indefensible.

# # #

James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”