Absolutist ignorance and trust

What can I say? It's been an awfully busy week or so and the point at which I get to relax is still just that--a mere point somewhere up ahead in the distance. Still, I'd hate to let another day go by without posting anything. While procrastinating recharging recently, I came across an interesting interview of one of my favorite fantasy writers, R. Scott Bakker, in which he said the following:

No frame-of-reference is absolute. It's only the limitations of our perspective, the fact we have difficulty gaining perspective on our perspective, that make it seem that way. We have a three pound brain in a universe so immense that much of the starlight we see is as old as the dinosaurs. We're like plankton trying to make sense of the ocean - less than plankton! No matter what our beliefs happen to be, odds are they're woefully incomplete, or just plain wrong. The only hope we have is to keep this in mind, and to continually question and revise, question and revise.

Thinking that one's frame-of-reference is absolute, that one pretty [much] knows the answers to pretty much all the important questions, closes down on the possibility of learning, of expanding one's frame-of-reference. It's literally a kind of enforced ignorance. And ignorance, as I think the example of Kellhus [the central character in his Prince of Nothing series] proves, is a kind of trust. The more inclined you are to think your frame-of-reference is absolute, the less inclined you are to ask questions, the easier you are to manipulate.

I thought this was an interesting take, and I'm inclined to let it stand on its own, but that idea of an ignorance of what lies outside of one's frame of reference being a sort of trust seems to demand further thought. America's fundamentalist Christians seem a prime example of this sort of ignorance, and the trust angle seems relatively obvious as well. Look how easily they line up behind boycotting Halloween or Disney or Harry Potter; look how they fall in line behind politicians who only vaguely resemble their ideals but mouth all the right platitudes at the right time.

Look at the flip side: realizing this is a vast oversimplification, I suspect that liberals--at least of a certain stripe--are much harder to really mobilize because we are so much less trusting, which perhaps stems at least in part from a non-absolutist view. The goofiest elements of the left, of course, are the trusting ones who've lined up behind their own absolutist views; they also tend to be the most easily organized, which probably is not a coincidence.

Thoughts? 

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