Science Quote by Herman Kahn

A statement this blunt is a kind of provocation: who, exactly, would volunteer to be for ignorance? Herman Kahn’s line works because it sounds like moral common sense while smuggling in a program. Kahn, the RAND-era futurist and nuclear strategist, built a career on insisting that polite avoidance is its own form of illiteracy. In a Cold War culture where euphemism could pass for wisdom, “I’m against ignorance” reads as a rebuke to the adult habit of not looking directly at frightening facts.

The specific intent is less about calling people stupid than about attacking a social norm: the preference for comforting ambiguity over explicit tradeoffs. Kahn argued that governments, experts, and citizens needed to do the grim arithmetic of deterrence, escalation, casualties, and recovery rather than hide behind pieties. In that context, ignorance isn’t a lack of IQ; it’s a decision not to think in public, not to quantify, not to model outcomes because the results might be ugly.

The subtext is also defensive. Kahn was often caricatured as a cold technocrat who “thought the unthinkable.” This line flips that charge: the real irresponsibility, he implies, is refusing to think at all. It’s a scientist’s ethos reframed as civic virtue. The rhetorical minimalism is the point: no ideology, no party, just a stark litmus test. If you find yourself offended by being “against ignorance,” Kahn suggests you’ve accidentally confessed to enjoying it.