If I were more eloquent...

No one likes a know-it-all. This is for several reasons.

• Even if we know everything about a topic, knowledge has a way of changing as time moves on. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow.
• The devil is in the details. When you really drill down into almost any topic, you come to the point of uncertainty.
• If the know-it-all says what we already believe (or want to believe), we will trust, if not, we will doubt. Either way, we are no further ahead in knowledge.
• We all have a little bit of the scientist within us...the desire to question, to not accept authority or standard beliefs. This spirit of experimentation is the force that, if not balanced with reason, can lead to tragedy, most frequently seen it teens. Authorities only maintain power over us by the use of threat and force. Reward is the main motivator for questioning and experimentation.
• As discussed previously, there are four elements of truth: the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and only the relevent truth. Rarely will you get all 4 elements from the know-it-all.

Many things in this world are based almost entirely upon authority. This is because:

• Some things cannot be tested. What passes for science in these fields is observation, documentation, and generalization. This is political science, for example. It is also seen in medicine as case reports and observations that may, or may not, be generalized. Politics and religion are the most common places where testing is not possible. However, observations can lead to some interesting conclusions. For example, communism and socialism seem to have no long term success as models for governments, defining success as economic prosperity and intellectual freedom.
• Some things have not been tested. For example, when a new curriculum is started in a public school, it often has not been tested in the classical sense of valid and reliable outcome measurement.
• Some things have not been tested rigorously. This is often seen in medicine where data evolves over time as questions become deeper.

One of the hard facts of life is becoming a cog, a piece moved by fear of the machine of authority, rolling along to prevent from being rolled over. As individuality is squashed by the authoritarian power of bureaucracies, public and private, we all need a place to let out our primal screams, to release our own questioning and experimentation, to express ourselves as the individuals we are.