Ignorance

People who do not challenge or expand what they know are sometimes the ones who hold the most power and in most cases are the most ignorant. This paper will explore the research and opinion of Linsey McGoey, expand on her research and challenge the very idea of strategic ignorance.

In the article written by Linsey McGoey called the Logic or Strategic Ignorance the author challenges the correlation between knowledge and power and states that ignorance is in some cases more useful than knowledge. Ignorance is now a tool to help industries and institutions prosper by avoiding liability in crisis simply because they did not make the effort to gain knowledge of the problem.

Her opening case explores a case about Jerome Kerviel, a trader for Société Générale who was sentenced to 5 years in prison for trading scandal that resulted in seven billion dollars in loss for is employers. There are two sides to this story. First there are the superiors claiming that Kerviel was acting under no supervision and that the upper management did not know what he had been up to. Then there is Kerviel’s side in which he states that the superiors had knowledge as to what he was doing but simply turned a blind eye to the matter. In this case, as McGoey analyzes, the most effective resource for the management was apply ignorance, to convince the public and investigators that there was no way to detect the actions Kerviel had taken. “For senior staff at SocGen, the most useful tool was the ability to profess ignorance of things it was not in their interest to acknowledge.” (McGoey, 2012) In other words, if the company does not investigate the problem or potential problem then they have no liability if they get caught. As touched on by Michael Taussig in his idea of “knowing what not to know”, the idea is to acquire just enough knowledge about the situation, so that they know that they need to stop acquiring knowledge.

While most sociologists are trying to prove that people are trying...