At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“A prudent man concealeth knowledge: But the heart of fools proclaimeth foolishness” (Proverbs 12:23).
Another way of saying this is that a prudent man holds back, while a foolish man empties whatever box it is that he has. A prudent man has knowledge, but he doesn’t let us see all of it. A foolish man has a bunch of nothing, and he spreads it out all over the table for us.
When someone is worth showing off . . . the prudent man still doesn’t. When something is not worth displaying, the foolish man will make sure to roll out all of it.
Another way of looking at this is to realize that a knowledge man is humble about what he knows, while a foolish man is very conceited about what he doesn’t know. If the foolish man could recognize that what he is displaying was foolishness . . . it wouldn’t be foolishness.
The prudent man understands that he doesn’t have all knowledge, and so he is careful about what he reveals. He budgets for the possibility that he does not know it all, and thus he increases the chances that what he is holding back is genuinely valuable. In contrast, the fool has no filter. He just vents everything. If he is thinking it inside, then he needs to be talking about it outside. The one good thing we can say about him is that he is certainly willing to share.
One of the things we can observe about all of this is that while human nature doesn’t really change, the advent of technology has certainly be able to amplify the reach of that human nature. In other words, the voluble fool can now share everything he doesn’t know on Twitter and Instagram, and people in New Zealand can be reading it in just seconds.
