What use is the study of ignorance?

Robert Proctor, a science historian has been studying the spread of ignorance in the public. His interest was sparked by a secret memo written by Brown & Williamson tobacco company which sought to discredit research proving that tobacco causes cancer. "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public," said the memo. "It is also a means of establishing a controversy." In 1995, he and linguist Iain Boal coined the word 'Agnotology', which means the 'study of ignorance'. Now we know that smoking also causes coronary artery disease, peripheral gangrene and emphysema, but is all this knowledge of any use? A thing so poisonous should have been banned, just as heroin and cocaine are banned, but politicians do not want to lose the enormous taxes collected on tobacco products and the votes of the millions employed by the industry. Vegetarians blame meat eaters for adding to climate change but a vegetarian diet may not be better because more forests will need to be cut down to provide crops for food. Even being vegan may result in the waste of a lot of land, not suitable for growing crops. There is only one way to stop global warming and that is by reducing the number of people in the world. They can easily prove it with science but political correctness prevents academics from doing so. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, told Dr James Mitchell, who interrogated him, that jihadists were taught to take advantage of political correctness in western countries to spread their message. He said that Muslims will triumph "through immigration and by outbreeding non-Muslims". The anti-Hindu secularists of India will ignore this. Anis Amri, responsible for killing 12 people by a truck in Berlin on 19 December was allowed to stay on in Germany because of political correctness. He was being paid $408 in cash by social services. There seems to be total consensus that the internet is responsible for ignorance as people seek those who agree with them, resulting in the formation of 'echo chambers' where no debate can take place. It would mean that all these years that the internet was not there we were living in a world of complete truth. African countries are withdrawing from the International Criminal Court because only Africans are being prosecuted there while those guilty of war crimes and genocide, such as Tony Blair, Dick Cheney and David Cameron are living in luxury. The best example of the blurring of truth comes from the art world where experts suspect that paintings worth about $240 million maybe fake. If experts cannot find any difference between the original master and the conman, can we say that the fake is an original? They say that we are living in a post-truth world, but the truth is that there is no absolute truth. Perhaps ignorance really is bliss.