Conor recently linked me to this post, “No One Knows What the Fuck They’re Doing.” I found the author’s ideas and the connections between them, very well communicated.

A few years ago, I encountered this language myself in the toilet hymnal, “Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.” I later discovered the same language of “things you know” is associated with the Landmark Forum—the cultish self-help seminar, of which the former Secretary of Defense is a member.

But the business of knowing, epistemology, is by far the branch of philosophy by which I am most intrigued. It’s like metaphilosophy. It’s actually the reason I changed majors from Philosophy to Spanish—I had a veritable panic attack one day during PHIL373: The Theory of Knowledge.

The first half of Dr. Holman’s lecture that day obliterated any security I’d come to appreciate in my own rational process, and thereby everything I thought I had learned up until that semester nine years ago. Holman had just finished describing knowledge as “justified, true belief.”

That phrase “justified, true belief” caused my brain to hang and beg to be rebooted. I can’t remember if I was hyperventilating, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I do remember my body seizing up from the back of my neck to my quads, mumbling something to my professor and getting the fuck out as quickly as possible. I might have sharted, too.

The best part was the look on his face. It was like this proud, cocky nod that somehow assured me it was both OK that I excuse myself, but also that he understood I would have to dropout of the major given the look on my face. And he smiled, understandingly, as if to say that it had come as a shock to him also—but that he had already come to grips with the hard limit I had reached in my mind after wrestling with it for some time. He was sad to see me go. As you can imagine, I found no solace in this assertion.

I have a handful of good lessons like this from undergrad, but this post is long enough already.