POST-HIERARCHICAL ANALYSIS · 004
Do Not Ban Curiosity—Learn to Evaluate Knowledge
A post-hierarchical analysis of Sandra Bernotaitė’s “On Unhealthy Curiosity”
Terms marked with ? are explained without leaving the article.
Source analysed: Sandra Bernotaitė, “Apie nesveiką smalsumą” [“On Unhealthy Curiosity”], Literatūra ir menas, 19 June 2026. Read the Lithuanian original ↗.
Sandra Bernotaitė’s essay begins with an apparently minor library anomaly: books on occultism, astrology, and esotericism stand beside philosophy and theology. For her, this proximity signals a broader cultural diagnosis. Can our culture still distinguish inquiry that leads towards truth and wisdom from curiosity fed merely by secrecy, strangeness, and forbidden knowledge?
Drawing on Saint Augustine’s concept of curiositas, Bernotaitė reminds us that the desire to see and know is not automatically a virtue. People are attracted not only to beauty, justice, and meaning, but also to horror, sensation, another person’s misfortune, and whatever excites anxiety without explaining anything. Her fundamental question is therefore not about one shelf. It is whether contemporary culture, having expanded freedom of inquiry, has lost the capacity to evaluate the directions inquiry takes.
This is an important question. Yet the answer cannot simply restore an old hierarchy of values or authorise one institution to decide which knowledge improves a person. A architecture in which rank or prestige does not automatically confer a monopoly on knowledge. Expertise remains important but is tied to the quality and testability of concrete contributions." data-term-title="Post-hierarchy" type="button">post-hierarchical approach preserves Bernotaitė’s demand for distinctions while changing the mechanism that makes them: the value of knowledge should emerge through transparent, reasoned, -sensitive .
Context: from scarcity of information to an excess of attention
In Augustine’s time, knowledge was scarce, difficult to obtain, and transmitted through limited channels. Today information exceeds our capacity to verify, understand, and use it meaningfully. Digital platforms compete not to educate people best, but to retain their attention longest.
Curiosity has therefore become an economic resource. Mystery, threat, scandal, conspiracy, and unusual claims often travel faster than careful explanation. Algorithms register clicks, viewing time, and reactions; they do not necessarily distinguish the significant from the merely attractive. A personal vulnerability has become a systematically exploited cultural force.
The library shelf can symbolise this shift, but the deeper problem is society’s lack of a shared infrastructure able to distinguish claim from evidence, hypothesis from tested knowledge, symbolic meaning from empirical fact, intellectual provocation from manipulation, interest in a phenomenon from belief in it, and intensity of attention from cognitive value.
Bernotaitė’s essay is therefore timely. Artificial-intelligence systems multiply accessible, persuasive content but do not guarantee reliable sources, meaningful questions, or wise answers. When producing information becomes nearly free, culture’s decisive ability is no longer obtaining information but collectively determining its value.
What Bernotaitė sees clearly
Curiosity is not the same as knowledge
The essay’s strongest thesis is its refusal to treat every curiosity as an intellectual virtue. Knowledge requires discipline, method, source criticism, doubt about one’s expectations, and willingness to accept an uncomfortable conclusion. Curiosity may begin inquiry, but it cannot replace it.
Experience is not automatically truth
A person may sincerely experience something, yet sincerity does not validate the explanation attached to it. Experience deserves respect as experience, while claims about the world made from it remain open to verification.
Neutrality is not a sufficient cultural principle
Equal accessibility is easily confused with equal value. Cultural institutions should not discriminate against readers, but neither must they pretend that all texts have the same reliability, argumentative quality, or educational value. Openness does not require abandoning judgment.
A library is more than a warehouse
A library preserves, describes, groups, and contextualises texts. Its orienting function becomes more important, not less, in an age of informational excess.
Where the post-hierarchical analysis begins
Bernotaitė asks whether culture can distinguish what develops a person from what merely interests one. The next question is: who has the right to make that distinction?
Historically, that power belonged to churches, universities, academies, editors, librarians, and state institutions. These institutions created valuable traditions, but could also suppress new ideas, defend their own interests, and reject knowledge later recognised as valid. We therefore need not choose between declaring all perspectives equivalent and restoring an infallible authority.
Post-hierarchy offers a third path. Evaluative power belongs neither to an amorphous majority nor to a permanent caste of experts. Procedures allow competence to become visible through concrete contribution, argumentative quality, and the ability to withstand scrutiny by others.
Proximity on a shelf is not epistemic equality
Library classification may carry too much symbolic weight in the essay. Books placed together are not necessarily declared equally true. Their relationship may be historical, polemical, or comparative. An occult text can be valuable to a historian of religion, art, or politics even if its claims about reality are unsupported. Astrology can be studied as a cultural phenomenon without believing planets determine fate.
The crucial task is not physically separating “dangerous” books from philosophy, but giving readers : what kind of text they are reading, why it matters historically, what standards its claims rely on, and how reliable those claims are currently considered. A post-hierarchical library would be not a neutral shelf but a multilayered system of orientation.
The difference between philosophy and occultism is not geographical
Bernotaitė describes philosophy as a transition from myth to logos and occultism as a route towards mystery and hidden knowledge. The normative distinction is meaningful, but historically philosophy, theology, mysticism, astrology, and early science were intertwined. A label alone does not establish the validity of each claim.
Philosophy is not automatically protected from speculation, authority worship, or unverifiable assertions, just as studying esotericism is not surrendering to it. What should be evaluated is the cognitive act itself: Is the claim clear? Are reasons offered? Can it be criticised? Does it address counter-evidence? Is the conclusion revised when better explanations appear? Is a symbolic narrative presented as an empirical fact?
The line between healthy and unhealthy curiosity thus runs not only between library sections, but through our relationship with knowledge itself.
Knowledge has multidimensional value
Not every object of curiosity is valuable merely because it attracts attention, but “developing a person” is not self-explanatory either. Does development mean moral content, factual accuracy, aesthetic experience, understanding others, critical thinking, or practical usefulness?
The same object may have different values in different contexts. A crime image may gratify morbid curiosity, serve as evidence, or support research into representations of violence. An occult text may mislead someone who treats it as natural law and still be valuable to a historian. Fiction may be empirically false yet philosophically fruitful.
Post-hierarchical evaluation should therefore use several explicit dimensions: factual reliability, quality of reasoning, historical and cultural significance, ethical risk, aesthetic value, educational potential, likelihood of manipulation, and suitability for a particular reader and purpose.
How post-hierarchy would address the problem
1. Classification gains an evaluative layer
A catalogue would identify not only a topic but also a type of knowledge: scientific inquiry, philosophical argument, theological doctrine, historical source, symbolic tradition, speculation, or entertainment. This is guidance about what we read, not a prohibition on reading it.
2. A diverse group evaluates, not one authority
Philosophers, historians of religion, psychologists, scientists, librarians, and other knowledgeable participants could anonymously assess texts and claims using explicit criteria. Names and positions would not overshadow arguments; competence in the concrete field would emerge from the recognised value of previous contributions.
3. The work is distinguished from its claims
A book may be culturally important while its empirical claims are false. It may be philosophically provocative yet dangerous when read as medical advice. Evaluation should reveal several aspects of value and risk rather than stamp a work simply “good” or “bad”.
4. Disagreement is structured rather than hidden
The system would show not only an average rating but also , clusters of arguments, and causes of disagreement. Readers could see whether a broad consensus or a principled controversy exists.
5. Evaluations remain revisable
New evidence and arguments can change knowledge. The system should preserve evaluation history while allowing conclusions to be reconsidered when a justified new contribution appears.
Two-stage cultural decidement
When a question concerns cultural policy—collections, school recommendations, funding, or informational warnings—post-hierarchical decidement proceeds in two stages.
Stage one: knowledgeable participants prepare alternatives
They define the problem, separate cognitive, cultural, ethical, and educational dimensions, propose possible approaches, evaluate one another’s arguments anonymously, and refine the best-grounded alternatives.
Stage two: affected people choose
Librarians, readers, teachers, students, parents, or communities select among professionally prepared alternatives. Experts do not usurp cultural government, while the public is not asked to solve a complex problem without intelligible choices. The first stage protects quality; the second protects legitimacy.
From healthy curiosity to collective wisdom
Healthy curiosity is a relationship with the unknown in which one asks without falling in love with the first answer, listens but verifies, separates experience from interpretation, revises opinions unsupported by reasons, recognises the limits of one’s competence, includes other people’s knowledge, and evaluates cognitive value rather than informational excitement.
Individual discipline, however, is no longer enough. No one person can verify all the information that reaches them. Healthy curiosity must become a collective institutional property: questions are not suppressed but transformed into structured joint inquiry.
Conclusion: culture needs no guardian of truth, but the ability to verify together
Bernotaitė accurately identifies a cultural weakness: we confuse accessibility with value, attractiveness with significance, experience with truth, and mystery with depth. Her question deserves to begin a wider public discussion.
Yet neither a cultural elite nor a central institution can be entrusted with the task alone. No authority is immune to error, power interests, or the blindness of its age; nor does this imply that all perspectives are equally grounded.
The post-hierarchical answer is neither relativism nor censorship. It is an architecture of collective evaluation in which curiosity remains the beginning of knowledge, claims are tested by appropriate criteria, competence emerges through contribution rather than title, disagreement becomes visible, knowledgeable participants prepare alternatives, and affected people make the decisions that shape them.
Philosophy and occultism may stand side by side on a shelf. In a mature culture, however, they should not remain unexplained, unevaluated, or epistemically undifferentiated. Their spatial proximity must not become equality of claims. The distinction should arise not from banning questions, but from a better culture of asking, reasoning, and verifying together.
Not everything that arouses curiosity leads to wisdom. But only by preserving the freedom to ask and building the capacity to verify together can we tell the difference.
From Uncontrolled Curiosity to Collective Wisdom
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