Can't always trust what we perceive. We certainly can't trust thoughts. And when it comes to science, there are plenty of truths that were later proven to be wrong due to the intrusion of delusive thoughts, some with serious consequences for people's lives, such as the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, relate relatedly. In the 19th century, it was considered a scientific fact that women's brains were smaller and therefore inferior to men's and therefore they weren't capable of an education and only suited for domestic life. And a similar claim was made comparing the brains of white people to black people. So thoughts of self and other Us and Them do get in the way of discovering the truth. And the author of this essay, Mark Lilla is saying that there's even more to it than that. He's saying that we want to know. We even see knowledge as a noble pursuit, and at the same time, we really don't, we really don't want to know so much so that we can find ourselves rejecting that which is totally reasonable and rational. He says, increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool's game that. Only cloaks the machinations of power others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning like a draft deferment, mesmerize crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational. Rumors trigger fanatical acts and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise, and to top it off, we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning, who idolize the people and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs. So based on the timing of the publication of this essay. You know, it was in the aftermath of last month's election. It sounds like he's reflecting on the circulation of lies and misinformation conspiracy theories, but he's not assigning blame to any one side or any one political faction over another. His point is that delusive thoughts and ideas are something that each and every one of us is capable of falling for no matter our life experience or political leanings or education. He says it is always possible to find proximate historical causes of these upsurges in the irrational war, economic collapse, social change, but doing so can distract us from recognizing that the ultimate source lies deeper in ourselves and in the world itself, the world is a recalcitrant place. In other words, it's unmanageable, out of our control, and there are things about it we would prefer not to recognize. Some are uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Those are the hardest to accept. Others are truths about the reality around us that once revealed steal from us, beliefs and feelings that have somehow made our lives better easier to live, or at least to seem that way. The experience of disenchantment is as painful as it is common, and it is not surprising that a verse from the otherwise forgotten poem became a common proverb, ignorance is bliss. So another way to put it is that the truth hurts, especially if we're separating ourselves from it. I it separating ourselves from things as they are. We can even convince ourselves that it's foolish to seek the truth because it's only going to cause us discomfort and anxiety. It is much easier to distract ourselves. It's a lot more satisfying also to invent self serving narratives. Feels good, at least temporarily, but eventually we do come to realize that resorting to our old strategies doesn't address our underlying suffering, and this gets at why Zen practice is difficult. On the one hand, it's super easy. It's so simple, relax and keep returning your attention to your practice. Simple. If. But in the process of doing that, we notice the stuff of the mind. And chances are, we're not going to like necessarily what we notice. We're going to notice the things that we're attached to, the things that we grasp at, such as seeking praise or being the center of attention, we also notice the things that we try to avoid, like conflict or certain people that we find annoying, and we'll notice our reactivity, how Quickly we get angry when things don't go our way, we'll notice all the time we spend lingering in thoughts judgments of ourselves and others, all the comparisons that we make, all The melodramas that we dream up. And this is what makes practice hard in the midst of all of that stuff of the mind persisting.