Amathia: How Smart People Fall for Dumb Ideas

The Ancient Greek word for willful ignorance

Long ago, I took to heart the maxim that one should avoid attributing to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. But what should one conclude about people who appear intelligent, competent - even well credentialed in their specialties - who nonetheless stubbornly embrace things that are obviously stupid?

Although its prevalence may make it feel like a modern problem, it was identified and named by Greek philosophers long ago. Ancient Greek even has a word for it: amathia (ἀμαθία, pronounced a-MATH-ee-uh or AM-math-EYE-uh).

Amathia is an ancient Greek philosophical concept meaning willful ignorance: a refusal to learn, especially by intelligent or educated people.

This concept helps explain how smart people - including experts in their fields - can fail not only spectacularly, but also with grave consequences when entrusted with authority. Such failures are not merely philosophical; they come at a cost - a cost that can be as high as millions of lives.

The ancient Greeks also had an answer to the underlying moral question: Is it malice?

Understanding Amathia

One difficulty in reading Greek philosophy in translation is that philosophers often give ordinary words technical meanings, which translators miss because the everyday sense still works. The result is a subtle but important loss of meaning, and this is the case with translations of amathia.

In ancient Greek, the prefix “a” negates, and the root mathia refers to learning. The result is a negation of learning. Unfortunately, in most translations to English, amathia is rendered as “ignorance.” That translation doesn’t quite get at it. If “ignorance” was intended, ancient Greek has a term for it: agnoia (ἀγνοεῖς), a negation of knowing. It’s the root for the English word “agnostic.” So even in non-philosophical usage, amathia is a particular kind of ignorance - one born of a lack of learning.

One cause of such a lack of learning is stupidity, and in some contexts, “stupidity” is an adequate translation. Another cause is the absence of educational opportunity, in which case “uneducated” is an appropriate translation. But in philosophical usage, amathia describes something else: the condition of someone who is intelligent and educated, but who is engaging in some sort of willful ignorance - a refusal to learn. Plato even gives a definition of amathia in the Laws:

Amathia arises when a person is devoid of understanding, being gripped not only by ignorance, but by a belief that he is wise, as if he was completely knowledgeable about things he knows nothing about at all. (Laws 863c)

Examples of Amathia

We have two clear examples of ancient philosophers accusing intelligent, well-educated people of amathia.

In the best-known of these, Socrates accuses his student, the young Alcibiades. Alcibiades was brilliant and superbly educated, yet something was chronically wrong with his judgment. As an adult, he gave disastrous advice that contributed to the collapse of the Athenian democracy. (If you’re interested in the full story of this, I recommend Massimo Pigliucci’s book, The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders.)

In another case, the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus accuses Epicurus of amathia for disparaging certain fields of study.

Amathia and Alcibiades

Plato’s Alcibiades Major records the following exchange between Socrates and his student Alcibiades. Socrates explicitly distinguishes ordinary ignorance (agnoia, ἀγνοεῖς) from amathia, making clear that amathia is something different.

Socrates: “But if you are bewildered, is it not clear from what has gone before [118b] that you are not only ignorant (agnoia ἀγνοεῖς) of the greatest things, but while not knowing them you think that you do?”

Alcibiades: “I am afraid so.”

Socrates: “Alack then, Alcibiades, for the plight you are in! I shrink indeed from giving it a name, but still, as we are alone, let me speak out. You are wedded to amathia my fine friend, of the vilest kind; you are impeached of this by your own words, out of your own mouth; and this, it seems, is why you dash into politics before you have been educated. And you are not alone in this plight, but you share it with most of those who manage our city’s affairs, [118c] except just a few, and perhaps your guardian, Pericles.”

Amathia and Epicurus

Epicurus thought that certain subjects, such as logic and rhetoric, were distractions from cultivating wisdom and not worth studying. As Cicero tells us,

Logic, on which your school [the Academic Skeptics] lays such stress, he [Epicurus] held to be of no effect either as a guide to conduct or as an aid to thought. (De Finibus 1.63)

Sextus Empiricus suggests that Epicurus dismissed these subjects not because they were useless, but because of his own lack of education and his hostility toward his more learned rivals: the Pyrrhonists, Aristotelians, and Platonists.

The Epicureans proceeded on the basis that the disciplines [e.g., grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic] contribute nothing to the achievement of wisdom - or, as some speculate, thinking that this was a cover for their own lack of education (for Epicurus is guilty of amathia in many things; even in ordinary conversation his usage is impure), and perhaps also because of hostility towards Plato, Aristotle, and the like, who had extensive learning. It was also probably because of their hatred of Nausiphanes, Pyrrho’s pupil; for he had a grip on many young men and paid serious attention to the disciplines, especially rhetoric. (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Grammarians, 1-3)

The charge here is not that Epicurus was unintelligent - he plainly was not - but that he turned his intelligence against learning itself. Rather than submitting his views to disciplines that might expose their weaknesses, he declared those disciplines worthless. This is a hallmark of advanced amathia: a refusal to learn justified by a theory about why learning is unnecessary.

Amathia Versus Wisdom

Socrates and Sextus Empiricus use amathia in other contexts. While “ignorance” is typically used in these quotes as a translation, understanding that the word they used was amathia changes the meaning. Amathia is not just willful ignorance; it’s the opposite of wisdom.

Here are two quotes from Socrates:

Wisdom alone, is the good for man, amathia the only evil. (Plato, Euthydemus 281d)

There is, he said, only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, amathia. (Diogenes Laertius, II.31)

Here’s a similar example, from Euripides’ lost play Antiope, quoted by Sextus Empiricus:

A single wise resolution vanquishes many hands,

But amathia together with a mob is the greatest evil. (Against the Grammarians 279)

Amathia and Evil

If Socrates and Euripides had meant simple ignorance, it would seem that they would have used the Greek word for that: agnoia (ἀγνοεῖς). That’s not what they meant. They’re not talking about ignorance as being some kind of original sin that we are all born with, and that this is the source of evil. Babies are ignorant, but they’re not evil. Everyone is ignorant of many things, and always will be. That is not the problem.

The problem is refusing to learn. That’s the source of evil.

It’s one thing for ordinary people to refuse to learn, but it’s far worse when those who are in positions of influence or have been entrusted with authority do so. Surely the latter is more disreputable than the former, not only due to their level of responsibility, but also because they have the intelligence and resources for enabling them to learn.

In the case of amathia, we have a particular kind of incompetence: willful incompetence. Once the incompetence becomes evident, then there’s an onus on the amathic to address it: to learn. While it’s a good rule of thumb to avoid attributing to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, if the incompetence can be attributed to amathia, it’s malice - just not of the ordinary sort.

So, these days, when the behavior of experts exposes to ordinary people that the experts are not only wrong, but they are visibly amathic, it’s no wonder there’s so much outrage. Since antiquity, our culture’s philosophical tradition has condemned amathia not only as evil, but as the very source of evil.

Amathia and Egotism

But one can go deeper still to this source of evil. Note how the amathia of both Epicurus and Alcibiades appears to be driven by egotism. Epicurus’ amathia was driven by resentment of other philosophers. Alcibiades’ amathia was driven by conceit about his own abilities. This egotism provides the will for willful ignorance.

Amathia and Intelligence

The combination of egotism and intelligence is what makes advanced amathia so dangerous. Egotistical, dumb people seldom get invested with enough power and authority to cause great damage - not that history doesn’t give us a long list of such people, but they typically inherit rather than earn their roles. While Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius is held up as a philosopher-king, at the crucial point of choosing a successor, he amathically chose his own son, Commodus, whose subsequent rule was ruinous.

The danger with intelligence is that it provides a powerful tool to rationalize one’s beliefs - even stupid ones.

Diagnosing Amathia

The willful ignorance of advanced amathia appears to be connected with belief. The amathic believe they don’t need to learn. They don’t need to learn because they already know the answer, and it is through use of their own intelligence that they convince themselves that they know the right answer.

Epicurus thought he didn’t need to learn anything about logic or grammar because he believed these were useless. That belief got reinforced because Epicurus’ message was attractive to those who lacked elite educations - most of the populace. Unlike the Lyceum and the Academy, Epicurus’ school welcomed not only the uneducated but also slaves and women. While these days we find that admirable, back then it was viewed with suspicion at best, if not disparagement.

Alcibiades believed he already understood politics. His belief got reinforced because he was initially very successful in politics. He convinced the voters to accept his recommendations and to award him a generalship. It was only later that the public noticed the amathia that Socrates saw, as Alcibiades led Athens to ruin.

Alcibiades reminds me of the behavior of a certain local politician who is not only a firm believer in a particular political ideology but also posts his positions in the local Facebook groups. When he gets pushback on those positions, he’s unable to defend or even explain them. Instead, he repeats his points, behaves dismissively, and frequently ends up saying we’ll just have to agree to disagree. His ideology tells him what to believe; there’s no need to learn anything else, especially evidence that contradicts his beliefs.

Alcibiades, however, was even worse. He believed that whatever was good for him must also be good for his country. You may recognize this kind of belief among some modern politicians. For this, Alcibiades sets an instructive example: he ended up being mistaken on all counts.

Amathia and Skin in the Game

Some lines of work and areas of inquiry are more subject to amathia than others.

In antiquity, very few people had jobs that required learning more than craftsmanship. In Socrates’ inquiries about the Delphic Oracle’s statement that no one was wiser than Socrates, Socrates interviews statesmen, poets, and craftsmen. With regard to the craftsmen, he found that they indeed had knowledge of their crafts, but on other topics, they lacked wisdom. Yet their state was better than that of the statesmen and poets, who didn’t even have that kind of knowledge.

Today, a vastly larger portion of the population has jobs that require extensive learning. Some of these jobs are more advanced versions of craftsmanship. They’re about know-how (Greek techne). Of course, nobody is perfect, and mistakes, sometimes big ones, happen in these high-skilled jobs.

The cargo ship that crashed into and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in 2024. There’s no ambiguity that mistakes were made.

When amathia happens in this kind of knowledge work, incentives and punishments are activated. There’s reality testing that holds this kind of high-skilled knowledge worker to account for their amathia. Consequently, one doesn’t see much amathia in these fields.

Other of these high-learning jobs are less like craftsmanship and more like statesmanship. These would include jobs in government and corporate bureaucracies, public education, and enforcement of laws and regulations - roles that were rare in antiquity but are now abundant. The world is now full of high-skilled jobs where the customer is an ambiguous collective. The jobs are largely not subject to reality testing in the way craftsman jobs are. Instead, the jobs are more like those of religious or ideological functionaries, in which social and institutional disincentives against nonconformity outweigh those against being empirically wrong. These fields are fertile grounds for amathia.

Perhaps the most lasting consequence of the Covid pandemic is what appears to be a widespread and long-lasting loss of faith in experts. People who were not experts could see experts make clear mistakes and engage in herd-like behavior. Adding to the public’s anger, seemingly no one was held accountable. Now that the public has observed amathia on such a major issue, they have started looking for it on others - and there’s plenty to be found.

Curing Amathia

So, there are two types of amathia: simple amathia (being uneducated) and advanced or philosophical amathia (refusal to learn). The cure for simple amathia is obvious: education.

The cure for philosophical amathia is disputed, with two different approaches advanced.

One approach is to treat it as a more difficult case of simple amathia. The cure is to point out the patient’s erroneous beliefs, educate the patient on why those beliefs are erroneous, and replace those beliefs with correct ones. A famous example of this can be found with the Stoic philosopher Epictetus:

Men are disturbed not by events, but by their dogmas (philosophical principles) about the events. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our dogmas about death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own dogmas. It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and of one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself. (Enchridion 5)

In general, this is the approach to amathia advocated by most of the ancient Greek philosophies of life. They just differ on the specifics of which dogmas (firm beliefs about non-empirical things) to reject or embrace.

The other approach comes from the Pyrrhonists. Their diagnosis is that the cause of advanced amathia is dogmatism. Alcibiades held a dogma about his political acumen. Epicurus held a dogma about the worthlessness of logic, grammar, and rhetoric.

Dogmatism isn’t cured by replacing erroneous dogmas with other dogmas; it’s cured by replacing dogmas with curiosity. This is not just a philosophical claim; it’s one that has been verified by empirical research:

“…curiosity promotes open-minded engagement with information that is contrary to individuals’ political predispositions.”

The willful ignorance of advanced amathia is counteracted by the desire to inquire and investigate. This opens the mind to multiple interpretations and makes it receptive to feedback on whether one’s decisions are working out well or poorly.

This receptivity to what’s actually happening is the essence of intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is the antithesis of amathia. It’s also the beginning of wisdom.

Holding a Mirror to Yourself

As you’ve gotten this far in a philosophical essay, you’re almost certain to be intelligent and well-educated. This is not meant as flattery, dear reader, for here it comes as a bit of bad news. It means that you’re just the type of person who is at risk for advanced amathia. You might be infected with it and not even know it.

But how to know if you’re infected? A useful test for amathia is this: when you encounter disconfirming evidence, is your initial reaction curiosity, or is it to discredit or dismiss the evidence?

Answering that question honestly requires a degree of self-knowledge. No wonder “know yourself” was the first of the three maxims the ancient Greeks inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

The three maxims form a hexameter verse, suggesting they were meant to be read together. The second, “nothing to excess,” applies naturally to amathia. Was Alcibiades’ confidence in his political judgment not excessive? Was Epicurus’ dismissal of logic and grammar not excessive?

The third maxim is harder to translate. A common rendering is “make a commitment, and peril approaches.” It, too, applies to amathia, which is a commitment that invites peril because it exceeds what one actually knows.

Because of its willful nature, amathia cannot be cured by force or instruction. If one suffers from it, the only cure is self-examination: searching for those perilous, excessive commitments that outrun what you actually know. No one else can do this work for you. Not even Socrates could save Alcibiades from himself.

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