“People are afraid to be pried loose from their ignorance,” poet Maya Angelou said way back in 1983. “Because they know their ignorance so well, they know it better than their body odors. And if you say ‘Come on, give up your ignorance!’ they get into that terrible position, terrifying position, which Shakespeare talks about at the end of the Hamlet soliloquy. They’d rather bear the ills they have than fly to others that they know not of. ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.’”