Is it rational to instinctively reject something that will keep you alive?

I never read or heard anything regarding personal or shared knowledge; however, experiences  and over the last 17 years suggest that there were different categories of knowledge, and last week’s classes just confirmed it. After having a more solid comprehension of this concept, I started drawing connections that occurred to me during my break. 

I took my sister to a movie on a very busy avenue in Paris, and walking down, you could see hundreds of heads crossing by. If you decide to apply this new concept to this very complex system ahead of me, you could imagine that every single person on that avenue knew what we call “shared knowledge”, these are mainly instinctive skills. But as you start adding information transforming the system into a more complex one, that spectrum of shared knowledge would get narrower, and you will end with many categories, or circles of a few people that share the same specific information and knowledge. 

But the avenue was only the “mise-en-bouche”, this situation got even deeper when I entered a theater to watch a play with my little sister. It was a comedy show, and at a point in the show, the actors made a reference to the word “inertia”. At that point, what is considered shared knowledge by Mr. Cross and I, wasn’t the case for my little sister who is only entering 6th grade next week. We can’t forget that she is looking at the play from a different perspective, since her schema is still being build, and is at its early stages. How could I “share” my accumulation of several years of knowledge, what we call the exchange zone, in only a couple words for my sister to understand the reference and consequently understanding the show? I now believe that because my sister is still young, and has little shared knowledge, it limited her understanding, and was difficult to get the remaining of the show. Limited knowledge can lead you to barriers with society, and if you aren’t up to date with that knowledge, society will instinctively reject you, since it is afraid of change. But we all know that change is a particular skill that keeps us alive, we adapt to extreme conditions, that is the basis of natural selection. 

How could society reject something that is keeping it alive from its own destruction?

We would classify this act of rejection as irrational. But if we look back at the lexical choice of that last sentence, the fact that we used the word irrational, means that our society works on a rational, organised basis, where chaos and irrational situations is seen as a danger. Society then rejects different perspectives or different opinion because it fears the chaos that this new perspective will cause, so it decides to simply eliminate it.

A crucial point that I think we should distinguish is relative knowledge. By now, we think there is the share knowledge that every human shares, which are primarily instinctive skills, and the personal knowledge, which is unique for each soul on Earth. But and the living creatures who don’t share the “human shared” knowledge? For example a fish, or an elephant? Each one has its own circle of individuals who share the same information. But a human won’t have the same shared knowledge that an elephant, or a fish will have amongst its specie. 

*mise-en-bouche is a French term that is simply impossible to translate, as we saw in our previous unit of Language, I found it so adequate for this situation that I had to put it. It is an expression that signifies an initial appetisers that has as objective to stimulate your tasting nerves in your mouth and prepare the meal that will be served.