Closed minded people who don’t know they’re talking about get on my nerves, but alas, there’s nothing I can do about it.
Again I ponder the phrase posted on my locker door:
“Why do people with closed minds always open their mouths?”
Alas, tis the way of the world.
I mean, why do people get themselves involved in business that they don’t really understand and then think they know all about everything that is going on? Do they know that they are just fooling themselves and that maybe they aren’t as knowledgable about the world as they think they are?
What’s all this I hear about close minded people. If your job is to mind people, then of course they should be close. How else are you going to mind them? I mean, really, how can you mind someone when they are not nearby? That’s just sil…what?..Oh, well that’s very different.
This is a good question, and it deserves a serious answer. Personally, I think you are confusing “closed-mindedness” with “ignorance”. Many would say they are the same thing, but they are not. To me, closed-mindedness means a person may have seen, heard or been exposed in some way to an alternative view, but refuses to take it seriously. They will not open their mind enough to consider another person’s point of view. But ignorance simply implies that a person hasn’t heard any other point of view beyond what they know.
Here’s an example, if that helps: The belief in ancient times that the sun rotated around the Earth was based on ignorance, i.e., a lack of information. However, when scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo were censured by the Catholic Church for stating this as a provable scientific fact, the Church was then exhibiting close-minded behavior.
To answer the question in the OP, I think many people get involved in things they don’t understand simply because they aren’t smart enough to know what they don’t understand. Because they really don’t know anything about it, the issue seems simple to them. They genuinely don’t know they are fooling themselves.