"The Ignorance the people live in leads them to commit mistakes against their own happiness"

Ignorance here is not a mere absence of facts but a condition that narrows perception, blunts judgment, and makes people vulnerable to manipulation. When understanding is thin, the horizon of desire shrinks to immediate comforts and familiar slogans; short-term relief gets mistaken for long-term well-being. People end up consenting to arrangements that wound them: voting away protections for the promise of quick gain, trading civic freedom for the illusion of order, accepting leaders who flatter grievances while quietly eroding dignity and rights.

The mistakes are “against their own happiness” because they are self-sabotaging. They are the errors of a public that has been kept in the dark, sometimes by neglect, sometimes by design. Poor education, concentrated media, and the drumbeat of propaganda cultivate a fog in which fear feels like prudence and cynicism poses as wisdom. Under such conditions, communities fracture, blame is misassigned to scapegoats rather than causes, and solidarity, the engine of collective flourishing, dissolves. People seek safety in narrow identities, consuming the narratives that soothe them while discounting the knowledge that could free them.

Happiness, in this view, is inseparable from the common good. A population cannot secure private contentment amid public decay; the insecurity of neighbors eventually knocks on every door. Ignorance breaks the link between personal interest and public interest, so individuals act as if their good can be secured at others’ expense, only to find the ground beneath them giving way.

Knowledge, then, is not ornamental, it is protective. It cultivates memory against the seductions of demagoguery, equips citizens to discern motive from principle, and aligns desire with sustainable goods: justice, participation, mutual respect. Humility becomes a civic virtue, the willingness to learn, to revise, to listen across difference, because it is the posture that keeps the door to happiness open. Where people understand, they choose more wisely; where they choose more wisely, they live more freely.