§   DEFINITION

Invincible Ignorance – an individual who used himself/herself as the sole authority.
 

An extreme form of the faulty authority is the person who uses himself as the sole authority of everything in the world.  When faced with facts and reason that differs from his own, the typical response of the ignorant is to sweepingly claim that these different ideas must come from faulty sources themselves, simply because they belong to someone else.  The invincible ignorant don’t read much, and don’t stray much from their view of their world that they formed when they were children.
 

EXAMPLE

A Reagan sympathizer asserts: “Of course I'm voting for the Reagan budget and tax bills. We need a strong defense — and by lowering the taxes on the wealthy, more capital will be available for investment, thus insuring economic prosperity and jobs.”

An economist overhears, and replies: “According to Lester Thurow, Lyndon Johnson's high military budget for Vietnam, coupled with a large tax cut, was a primary cause of the inflation of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Reagan's proposed increase in military spending is three times the increase Johnson established.  Don't you think this program might be risky?”

The first man rebuts: “Not at all. I'm a firm believer in it. Those economists don't know what they're talking about.

Reaganomics can be explained as either good or bad, depending on your context.  However, in this specific exchange of arguments, the economist is better qualified to be the authority here.  True, he can be a biased economist, but even so, he understands more about it than the first man.  Notice how the first man simply waves off his opponent’s argument, even though these alternate ideas are better validated due to the evidence cited.
 

FOR  YOUR  INFORMATION  

Invincible ignorance is also an egocentric attitude found in extremely defensive people who dislike being wrong, or being proved wrong, in public.  Their attitude usually comes across like this: “I am always right; everybody else is always wrong.”  Children may respond to these situations by either getting mad or retorting with an expletive: “Shut up!” or “Whatever!”  They know they have been caught but have egos that are too big to allow them to admit that they are wrong.  Adults tend to be state their level of discomfort more defensively: “Well, I’ve never heard of that before, so it must not be true,” or “That’s not what Oprah said.”