All That Knowledge Won't Save You

Author’s Note:

This essay contains brief references and minor quotes from Brandon Sanderson’s The Well of Ascension. While they do not spoil major plot points, I wanted to provide a heads-up for those currently moving through the Mistborn series.

—Jon ♾️

There is a trap that scholars and deep thinkers often fall into: the trap of objectivity. This is the kind of objectivity that collects knowledge only to sit on the sidelines while the true actors of our time sacrifice to make real change.

I’ve fallen into this very trap myself, but I am looking for a way to break free. I am not here to ridicule the thinkers. This Substack is rooted in my passion for introspective thought and philosophy. I live for this shit. At my core, I will always be the introspective type—I wouldn’t change that. Still, I see the folly of becoming too enamored with hoarding knowledge, living more in books and discussions than in action. I am no longer blind to the pitfalls of planners and thinkers who remain far from the battlefield of life.

Those who can relate understand what it feels like to become a “professional” of thought, tucked away safe in a personal library. Edward Said argued that the true role of a thinker isn’t to be a professional planner worried about mass appeal, but an amateur, someone who refuses to be moved by corporate interest and greed and is willing to speak harsh truths. To remain objective is, as I see it more each day, just a sophisticated way to remain silent.

Nobody knows you better than you know yourself. Only you know if you’re doing all you can, or if you’re avoiding opportunities to grow because you’re too afraid to take the leap. For me, the delusions convinced me that seeking knowledge alone was where my writing was used best. It’s easy to romanticize the life of a writer: the aesthetics of the desk, the smell of the journals, the candle burning. I’m a sucker for all of it. But there’s more to life than aesthetics. And while words can inspire revolutions, it is more often the actors—those willing to use their knowledge in a material sense—who make the biggest difference.

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We look at men like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or Huey Newton, and marvel at their quotes like they’re encased in glass, too precious to do anything but read. As I write these words, the irony is not lost on me. I never wanted to share my writing online to show how “conscious” I was. Instead, the desire to share my work started from the need to free my mind from a vortex of thoughts, and evolved into something more vulnerable than I expected, and within that vulnerability, I’ve had to reconcile with my own hypocrisy. For too long, I have resembled the person marveling at legacies rather than using them as examples of actual impact.

Martin Luther King's quotes are viewed through the prism of encouragement and empowerment now, but toward the end of his life, he was criticized by his own people for being too brash. You saw this when he spoke on the Vietnam War and poverty. His Letter from Birmingham Jail starts by addressing the clergymen who thought him too “reckless.”

The beginning of his letter is a direct response to those who preferred a more tame acceptance to the power of tension. King understood that his mission required the unpleasant kind of tension needed to sting the conscience of society, not the polite fence-sitting meant to give the responsibility of equality to the passing of time. He wasn’t being reckless for the sake of it. He was instead creating the required pressure to rise from the insidious infection of passivity and half-truths.

Older black people I’ve known, those who remember the sit-ins, the beatings, and the assassinations of their heroes in real time, have told me that back then, the love for someone like King was far from unanimous. While we deify him now, the community then had a broad spectrum of opinions. Some saw and appreciated the fact that he was fighting for them. Others thought he was only making things harder. Regardless, he mobilized, pushed forward by conviction.

I have often told myself I’m just waiting for the right moment, but King’s words haunt that delusion: “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.” He warned that time is indifferent to our struggles. If we remain on the sidelines, waiting, then time becomes an ally of personal stagnation.

Knowledge is the foundation, but it will always be our actions that make the difference.

“The men I read about, Sazed… these were not men who sat and planned the best ways to hide. They fought; they sought victory. Sometimes, they were reckless—and other men called them fools. Yet, when the dice were cast, and the bodies counted, they were men who changed things.”

Though these words were spoken by a fictional character inThe Well of Ascension, they still carry a significance that anchors itself firmly in our own reality. They are the words of someone who understood that the world isn’t moved by those who wait for it to be safe.

Those who change the world refuse to hide. They understand that knowledge isn’t a trophy to be displayed, but a debt paid forward. It demands responsibility—the responsibility to share, to apply, and to give back to those still in the dark. The cold truth is that knowledge is a burden. Once you see injustice for what it is, remaining on the sidelines is a luxury the world can’t afford.

I felt my own struggle mirrored in the character of Sazed’s existential epiphany later in the book. He realized that his obsession with collecting knowledge was itself a form of cowardice:

I have spent my life as a scholar, he thought. I have spent it looking back, focusing on what has been. But the world is not what has been. It is what is happening now.

The past is a beast that is easy to study but impossible to change. Our personal history haunts us with the phantasms of wasted opportunities, while the collective history of humanity weighs on us through cycles of the same ancient violence in a modern backdrop. For the thinkers among us, focusing on “what has been” is often just a struggle to escape our own minds and the demands of the present. We remain in our heads because we are too afraid of what our hands might have to do, terrified of what we stand to lose when the real fight begins.

It’s so easy to get lost in the kind of defiance that would prefer thinking and planning over the fight of doing. The real fight rarely resembles an actual battlefield. It’s just my life waiting for me to engage with it once I step away from the desk, once I step outside my mind.

Despite the darker tone of my recent essays, as I sit here letting these words spill to a serenade of smooth R&B, I understand myself more each day. That doesn’t mean I’m not wrestling with the universal weights—that of love, purpose, making ends meet, and watching a parent age.

Life has been hard, but I feel stronger when I write these confessions. Years ago, before I started sharing my work online, I was so ignorant. I didn’t know how to apply what I was learning or see the areas in myself that needed healing. However, with time, I’ve understood that exploring the past and understanding the world is only a portion of my role. Eventually, the world needs what we’ve learned through our actions. If I have the means and knowledge, I have a responsibility to help.

History’s heroes weren’t caped crusaders. They were people who saw injustice and refused to remain voyeurs. They knew that standing on the side of objectivity or waiting for time to resolve everything was just cowardice. To act and be deemed reckless or foolish didn’t deter them, because they realized there was no other way to live and remain at peace with themselves.

Wouldn’t the world be better if more people chose that necessary tension? If they were happy to be the fool rather than the scholar who waited for time to bring salvation? I’ll be more than the words I write. In a world happening now, a library is just a place to hide, and I am done hiding.

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Much love,

—Jon ♾️

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