How does one define knowledge? A quick search through the various online repositories, viz. definethat,answers.com, the freedictionary.com, dictionary.com yield the result (in a condensed form) that knowledge is the state of knowing, familiarity, acquaintance, awareness from study or investigation, but knowledge differs from data or information in that new knowledge may be created from existing knowledge using logical inference. If information is data plus meaning then knowledge is information plus processing, knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value. The crux of the matter is: knowledge is a dynamic thing and evolves as the humans evolve. And one needs to keep on exercising the grey cells, continuously, ad-infinitum.
Knowledge is the corner stone of all activities, viz. academic, artistic, emotional, business, etc. The purpose of any human activity employs the usage of the current knowledge with the (mostly unperceived) aim of augmenting it. Knowledge is power (to quote some anonymous), and power gives you freedom, and hence the ultimate quest of humans on this earth is the quest for knowledge. All adventures, journeys into the unknown, are the manifestation of this quest.
Since knowledge is equated with power, and rightly so, the history is more than replete with instances of a few 'powermongers' making all desperate efforts to keep a tab on the knowledge base from reaching the general mass. The business of the 'powermongers' critically depend on the ignorance of the people over whom they want to rule, be it the king over the subjects, the president (or the chancellor, or whatever the nomenclature of a democratic setup may be) over the citizens, the priest over the devout believers, or the corporate over the consumers. The business of these 'powermongers' prospered in the medieval ages due to the generic laziness of the majority of population in taking up the responsibility of their lives with the attitude of 'whatever will be will be.........', until renaissance and democracy woke up the western world (Europe, to be precise), and their colonization of the rest stirred the long buried concept of freedom and knowledge.
The flame of knowledge could never die, for that is the essence of human existence. It was always preserved, and will always be preserved, by some small fragments of the societal set up (which at times may constitute of individuals, the smallest fragment of a society). The essence of democracy is to pervade the whole society with the availability of knowledge, rather, to put it more correctly, remove the obstacles from path of gaining knowledge for any and every branch of the societal set up. Knowledge is not something that you earn or gain, it is a level of realization that you attune yourself to, and the purpose of democracy is to setup up a system which will not generate unnecessary obstacles in the path of self realization to the level each and every individual aspires to. That is the ultimate state, the loftiest goal, that any society can aspire for, it is the utopian dream of the small societal fragments that toil day and night to keep the flame burning, and they find their purpose of existence in this toil.
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