By Kainoa Horcajo
Access to education, the internet, and smartphones were supposed to cure our ills, banish our evils, enlighten the masses, and transform every individual into an informed and educated voter, altruistic human, and decent citizen.
It has undoubtedly done a lot of that for many. Across the world, access to education and technology and information has pulled millions out of poverty, increased the median quality of life, and given hope to the downtrodden.
We are also now seeing the dark side of this unfettered access: The rise of Alt-Truth, Alternative Facts, legions of keyboard experts and warriors, and the death of true mentorship. Every Merrie Monarch, thousands of hula experts emerge. Post-COVID, the world is suddenly filled with infectious disease and vaccine experts. And you wouldn’t believe how many constitutional law and tariff experts there are now.
Hawaiians, like all humans, are knowledge-seeking organisms. We yearn to know, to understand, to decipher, to comprehend. But our kūpuna also understood the need for limits. They understood that not all knowledge and wisdom are for everyone, all the time. There was a deep understanding that information, knowledge, and wisdom can, and sometimes SHOULD, have restrictions placed upon it.
The Hawaiian world separated knowledge into two categories – that which is noa and that which is kapu (forbidden) or huna (hidden).
Noa is the concept of being “free from restriction.” Kapu and huna are the concepts related to restriction. It doesn’t necessarily mean specific knowledge is top secret or highly classified. It could simply mean that there are a few prerequisites you need to fulfill before it is shared. Hawaiian historian and Lua Master Charles Kenn had a saying that he passed down to his students: “Hūnā nā mea hūnā.” Keep secret that which is sacred.
Nowadays, it’s easy enough to find a peer-reviewed study of some insanely complex theory or law online. But just because we can read the words, doesn’t mean we can accurately understand their implications or conclusions.
Most of us drastically overestimate our abilities. And as any recent scroll of the polarized arguments on social media shows us, this is across the board for all subjects.
What if, instead of demanding the right to access all information all the time, we asked ourselves what good it would do?
Our ancestors knew the power of information (and the use of it) when they said, “I ka ʻōlelo i ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo i ka make (in words there is life, in words there is death) – a reminder that information, knowledge, and wisdom carry great power.
This isn’t wholesale advice to blindly trust any papered expert. It’s a reminder that sometimes more information isn’t a good thing. That when considering something, we should seek to verify the source (nānā i ke kumu) and ask ourselves whether we have the intellectual and emotional capacity to comprehend it.
Kainoa Horcajo is a writer, speaker, storyweaver, cultural practitioner, steward of his ʻohana’s regenerative farm in ʻĪao Valley on Maui, and principal owner of The Moʻolelo Group, a multidisciplinary consultancy. To subscribe to his digital newsletter, “Think Hawaiian,” go to https://kainoahorcajo.com/newsletter/.
