Blue pill or red pill? How much reality can you really handle?

The basic principle of news, journalism and investigative reporting, as well as commissions of inquiry, informants, whistle-blowers and sharers of information… indeed, the principle of learning itself, is that knowledge is good.

The more you know, the better equipped you are to navigate the storms of life. While this is true, we also need to ask ourselves this: Are we ready for the truth?

As Beyonce once asked, so presciently: “Can you handle this?”

The saying that “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” is not strictly accurate. But it can help you feel better about your situation. You get to subsist in a state of blissful ignorance.

I sometimes feel some of us choose this path, because deep down we fear reality. It is the same principle proposed in the Matrix trilogy: would you choose to take the blue pill, which allows you to live in ignorance, or the red pill, which reveals the full, unvarnished truth in all its awful horror?

Perhaps we don’t consciously even make this choice, but by our actions, the opinions we hold, the reading we undertake and the people we trust, we do make this choice.

It is so much easier to believe a simple, categorical “truth” than a messy, complex one which is constantly shifting, being further complicated by new developments. It is easier to believe that something is 100% true, than that it is only, say 60% correct, most of the time.

How about a truth that once was once a useful generalisation, but is now no longer valid? Would you be able to abandon this belief? Or do you define yourself by it? Is giving up your beliefs a type of suicide? Do you cease to exist when you no longer stand for the same things?

Once, in another epoch, I caught a ride with a recent acquaintance from San Diego to Los Angeles. I was a poor, surfing traveler and I’d overstayed my visa. Essentially, I was an illegal alien trying to get to New York where I had an exit flight waiting for me.

Between San Diego and LA lies Camp Pendleton, one of the largest US Marine Corps bases in the US. The highway north, the I-5, passes through the army base.

I was riding with my friend Chris. When we had just spent 30 minutes driving through Camp Pendleton, and reached San Clemente, Chris pulled into a gas station to refuel. He was pale and sweating bullets. “My god,” he said. “I thought we were going to run out of gas in Camp Pendleton!”

It turned out that for the previous half an hour, while I had been blissfully enjoying the scenery, chatting and looking forward to LA, Chris had been stressing his ass off!

Inside the army camp, the I-5 is patrolled by Marine Corps troops, he explained to me later. So if we had run out of fuel there, it would have been US soldiers who came to investigate. They would have requested ID, my funny accent would have betrayed me and I would likely have found myself in custody as an illegal alien before the night was out.

Overstaying a visa is all fun and games in Hawaii where I had made the decision. But a few miles from the Mexican border, it is altogether different. I am familiar enough with US security forces to know that border policing is a humour-free zone. Detention and deportation would have been the best I could look forward to.

I had been about a quarter gallon of gas away from the detention centre. And I didn’t even know it, because Chris had chosen not to tell me.

“I figured there was no point stressing you out about it,” he explained to me.

He dropped me off at my destination and I never heard from him again. Over the next month or two, I made my way across the US to the Newark International departures gate and freedom.

Looking back at that evening, I sometimes ask myself, am I glad I knew so little about my own predicament? Or do I wish I had been more fully informed? Would I rather have spent that half hour on I-5 in white-knuckled terror? Would I rather have been aware that I was one engine splutter away from a jail cell?

The answer I’ve come up with is this: I was a passenger, and there was nothing I could do either way, so it’s just as well I was ignorant. But had I been driving, living, making the decisions, then I would have wanted to have all the facts at my disposal.

The same might apply in other situations. You only need knowledge if you’re going to use it. Otherwise, you might as well proceed as a blissfully ignorant passenger riding shotgun through life.