Fields of Possibility: On Meta-Ignorance and the Subtlety of Modern Captivity.

The danger of this isn’t merely in the domestication of foolishness or the mass resistance to logic and reason, but the limitation this anomaly places on our individual potential. It isn’t just about the collective dumbing down but the growing allergy to depth, nuance, and insight.

We assume evolution where there’s erosion while we exile wisdom in service of comfort. We are thinking but only within created, un-investigated thoughts —we are thinking through thoughts that are not ours..

Our hunger for growth and development is really a cry to relieve ourselves from the pressure of thinking, of uncertainty, of newness and of the necessity of true transformation. We are not looking to understand, we simply want to stand. We want to resolve complexity without facing it. We want to ascend without descent. We chase productivity ideas that keep us moving but trapped within systems that stifle genius - because momentum seems superior to meaning.

We want the glory of originality but cannot bear to hold the weight of our own fluidity, so we mimic. When we say we’ve found ourselves, we want to believe it whereas all we’ve found is someone else whose expression exonerates us from the pressure of truly seeing ourselves - our truth, our work, our depth, our vision.

We have visions or shall I say, borrowed passions? Where the image of our becoming and the structure of our ambition is adopted not engineered. Where what we pursue, though noble is designed to collapse under its own weight because it wasn’t ours to begin with.

We want, but have no idea why we want what we want or how we came to want it in the first place. Our desires, borrowed. Our pain, borrowed. Even our fears and enemies, borrowed.

I realized sometime ago that I had inherited an enemy that wasn’t mine. I wasn’t asked to, I didn’t want to, I didn’t even need to. But, I did. Just continuous exposure to the environment this “enemy” was discussed until I found myself defending against a threat that had never actually touched me. Thinking back as I write, I feel shame - which is a human thing, by the way. Shame that I was too fragile to disavow the narrative when it was most convenient to belong to it. Shame that I mistook absorption for awareness, and loyalty for lucidity. Shame that I couldn’t see…shame of being so unaware of my unawareness.

As I write, I find that It’s easier to inherit an enemy than to interrogate one; easier to stand with a chorus than to risk the solitude of dissonance. It’s easier to belong. To be bound offers the promise of community but to be free requires agentic definition which if we’d be honest isn’t as sexy as it sounds. Choosing to go left while everyone else goes right is a form of existential suicide.

It’s why we contort ourselves…why we choose to reduce our intelligence. Because to think deeply and speak precisely is arrogant. What we don’t see is how we not only start to believe it but actually re-organize our minds to fit this constraint. We think it’s mastery but it’s colonization with assumption of control.

I was having a conversation with a friend and mentioned to her that I used to feel insecure about my body. She couldn’t believe it. She laughed and shouted out that it couldn’t be possible. But it was.. my natural curves was the easiest insult my peers could find and at the time, it felt true. It felt true because in comparison to my mates, I could see the difference. It made me self-conscious that I mustn’t sway my hips or I’d be ridiculed.

This is the quiet violence of our age. We inherit everything but responsibility. Beliefs without inquiry. Convictions without confrontation. Information without scrutiny. Our borrowed meaning becomes our pride even when it collapses around us.

This is how wars are stirred on ideologies that seem sound but hollow at the core. With narratives propped up by emotion and unexamined by mind. And so we march into battles we didn’t choose, fighting ghosts we didn’t name, for causes we barely understand.

We are so ignorant of our own ignorance because we have decided to absorb without friction. We don’t want friction. And those who dare question, those who dare sit into the complexity of duality are crucified. Curiosity becomes suspicious. Inquiry is condemned and spirituality is diluted to corrupted intuition with yay & amen!

The tragedy then, isn’t that we don’t know, but that we no longer wish to know and while some do realize this, others stay blind to their growing apathy for thought. The consequence is not just ignorance but the normalization of shallowness, the disorientation of soul and the limitation of potential.

This is where it bites me - POTENTIAL; on an individual, systemic and collective level.

It bites me because potential is simply possibility awaiting awareness. We cannot even know the full breadth of our potential when it’s contorted to a field of possibility. What that means is, regardless of how much we think we are capable of, we are shrunk based on our capacity for thinking. It is why we want what we want. What we want is NOT new or foreign; but largely influenced and domesticated by what we are exposed to. And there’s no telling the degree to which our field of possibility is reduced by the poverty of our exposure.

When your constant exposure is to ideas and ideals that facilitate, albeit unconscious, a specific narrative - what options or, to stick to our term; what “potential” could possibly exist for you? What vision is possible within created constraints but the vision it permits?

Potential, therefore can only be based on what is possible made visible - meaning that, you can only grow based on the possibilities that your current exposure or field of vision allows. This reminds me of something my dad would always say to me continually; He would say that the fish that swims in a pond would think it is the best swimmer until it’s placed in an ocean. The idea here is, our environment determines what we aspire to or frown at. It defines not just the limit because that isn’t seen but the possibilities that abound at the highest level.

And, environment isn’t just physical, it’s mental…it’s existential. Environment is a field of awareness where the context of that awareness becomes the frame of its people. Such that even in rebellion, their rebellion is a created necessity to provide the illusion of difference.

I remember seeing a child throwing tantrums because his guardian had taken his tablet from him. As I witnessed this unfold, I saw that it wasn’t about the tablet but about the child’s disdain for boredom. Quite fascinating really because children by nature are curious, inquisitive creatures. A child never really gets bored because they have the ability to find something to make sense of - whether it’s sand, a weird object, or even digging your skin like my sister used to when she was a toddler. But at such a young age, this child was losing the very faculty of his humanity. He couldn’t handle boredom, he couldn’t handle his own mind…he simply scavenged for his tablet like a drug addict does his drugs.

What was more interesting was his guardian who couldn’t handle his liberation, his cry for help, for freedom, for that pain of dependence to stop, for that resistance to nature to end. The guardian couldn’t. And after a while of high-pitched cries, his drug, sorry, tablet was handed to him.

I mean, don’t become the saint now because I won’t let you. That child is like you and me. How we never have the time to read a book but can never stop scrolling our phones. How we never practice our own doubt because we want an answer that tends us to the right path, right now. How we never question our beliefs because it holds us together. And how when it gets questioned we become selective in reasoning, defensive in action and loud without any justifiable claim for why it is our truth. We are constantly throwing tantrums but it looks like confusion, irritation, disorientation and anxiety.

My point is: the mind cannot transcend what it refuses to question. If our thinking is colonized by borrowed assumptions, our potential is bound by them too. We speak of “limitless capacity,” yet our limits are silently dictated by the range of ideas we’re willing—or permitted—to encounter. The real constraint isn’t talent, time, or opportunity; it’s the perimeter of perception. We are caged by what we consider thinkable.

And so it isn’t even about vision but imagination. It isn’t about ambition but meaning. It isn’t about growth but transformation. It’s about what we are nurtured to think IN.

This is the tension.

The world we live in today shrinks the field in which potential can operate. And we hide behind seductive ideas of what is now permissible whereas our capacity for thought, imagination and expression at the highest level is imprisoned.

To expand one’s potential then, as is commonly preached is not to acquire more skills or affirm more confidence; it is to rupture one’s own frame of possibility. It is to look at the architecture of your thought and ask: Who built this, and on what assumptions was it raised?

This is the invisible architecture that keeps us bound. Not the limitations we can see and resist, but the ones we cannot perceive and therefore cannot challenge. This is how we stay caged but convinced we’re free. Because you cannot question what you can’t perceive. You cannot answer a question you don’t know you should be asking. You cannot challenge assumptions you don’t know are assumptions. And you cannot solve a problem you don’t know exists.

This is what I’ve diagnosed as META-IGNORANCE & THE SUBTLETY OF MODERN CAPTIVITY.

Meta-ignorance because, we are ignorant of our own ignorance not in the sense of “field expertise” but in the frame of our being. Entire systems are built to keep us within specific loops of thought where our biases are constantly reinforced and the range of possibility is constantly narrowed while we assume advancement.

The education system trains you to reproduce information rather than generate insight. You graduate thinking you’ve learned to think when you’ve learned to perform thinking. The danger here often for those the system defines as brilliant is the struggle between rightness and wrongness because they never learned what it means to be wrong. Except that it means not getting where you want. The problem pushes back against itself when they stay looped in cycles of confusion and self-contempt because they are in the hustle for the “right path.” It’s seen in how fragile you become in the face of failure, how you collapse meanings to fit the narrative that if the answer isn’t A or B, then you are wrong. So life becomes a constant marking scheme with questions you must not fail.

Then there’s the information economy that profits from engagement not enlightenment. Where ignorance looks like wisdom because in a world where information is so widespread, ignorance would have to reinvent itself. We have become the instant noodle generation in practice and in thought. We demand digestibility as we get high on micro-content that gives us the illusion of mastery. Complexity is treated as a defect, difficulty is seen as elitism. Discomfort has become synonymous with wrongness. And if an idea doesn’t land immediately, if it requires effort to hold, we’ve been trained to swipe it away as “not for us.” The assumption is that if something requires effort to understand, the problem is with the thing, not with our unwillingness to exert effort.

Our attention is arrested as we trade in depth for speed, contemplation for consumption, and meaning for the mere appearance of being informed. We’ve become collectors of information rather than cultivators of understanding.

We‘ve become mentally sedentary in a world that celebrates motion.

This may sound gory, but we are like horses in a race - subject to the torture of pleasing its onlookers, of being their spectacle of wonder and amusement.

This is what I mean by modern captivity: It doesn’t look like oppression because it’s dressed in the language of choice, freedom, and connection. But examine the outcomes. Are we more free? Are we more connected? Or are we more fractured, more distracted, more anxious than ever?

The great book says that Wisdom is justified by her children. I ask, what children do we perpetually produce?

Faith Ohio.

Unlocking Genius in People, Systems & Ideas

www.faithohio.com