For a few years now I've been thinking that there ought to be a new holiday in America, called Fear of Knowing Day. The nature of the Fear of Knowing is complicated, and worth considering for yourself, but I'll sketch out a few points of reference below the fold.
Hamlet's a good place to start, in particular as regards the responsibility of revenge that comes with knowledge of his father's murder. It's a responsibility akin to that asserted by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
In part, then, the Fear of Knowing is an anxiety produced by awareness of that duty imminent in knowledge. To know is to become responsible; and some knowledge carries with it overwhelming responsibility. Quite sensibly, we escape the anxiety of a paralyzing burden by suppressing the awareness that occaisions it.
It's very much the way people often deal with trauma - sometimes in the very moment it is occurring. Like in the Matrix, when that helicopter hits the skyscraper and the fabric of the building just absorbs the impact, the mind in fear of knowing normalizes disruptive events as quickly as possible. We can observe this same psychic tendency, though in a different context, in the way that the sleeping mind 'protects the dream' by integrating external stimulus - a ringing telephone, for example. We might think of official investigations, like the Warren Commission, or the 9/11 Commission, as acting in the same way to protect the national dream.
"From a god's Olympian perch I assure you," says Lord Leto, God Emperor of Dune, "that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies." The Fear of Knowing is the fear of what lies outside the bubble of that shared myth - fear, as Ursula LeGuin put it in The Lathe of Heave, of The World After April.
It is in religious terms the fear of Judgment Day (the fear of knowing as the fear of being known); which amounts to a collective fear of death. "A man's death is of the same quality as his life," Rumi said. The thought of this - when we look out at the manner in which we, as a society, live - is terrifying.
But then, the fear of knowing is also a healthy aversion to fundamentalism. We fear knowing out of a reasonably accurrate understanding of the error in certainty. Absolute purpose, identity and judgement - dangerous passions - are for fools and fanatics.
We are left then, like Hamlet, caught between two evils. To know or not to know, that is the question -- Whether tis nobler to wake or to continue to have faith in the dream. Hence the location of Fear of Knowing Day on 9/11, the events of which were as if a challenge to the integrity of the collective dream - a dreamsign, in the parlance of lucid dreaming researchers.
Though monotheistic religions of the past couple millenium have turned Judgement Day in to a singular event at the End of History, there is strong reason to believe that the model for this event was actually, and is actually, the cyclical precession of the equinoxes, which gives rise - within the context of particular cosmic systems - to the passing of old ages and the dawing of new. Fear of Knowing Day, then, might be understod as a holiday to help facillitate the transformation imminent in the cosmic reality of precession. The World is coming to an End; long live the World!
In this sense it is much like New Year's Day, except on a vaster scale, within an element of evolutionary transformation - and not simple rebirth - added. Fear of Knowing Day is a day to admit to the destruction of the old system, and to discover, beyond fear, new ways of living.
"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."
-The Litany Against Fear
"A mirror and our greatest faults and we are galloping along the way."
-Rumi