Is knowledge really that important

An answer to this might be started by asking another question; how much knowledge does one need to survive with a reasonable comfort level? In order to survive at all, a person or animal needs some sort of knowledge, so in that respect it is very important. In an animal's case we usually call this instinct which is a form of hard wired knowledge geared towards this survival. Humans have lost this inherent knowledge and in many cases would die if left suddenly to survive alone in the wild without some previous skills learned prior to being cut off from society. (Perhaps this is true for animals that have been in captivity too long also.) But that situation aside, the question really is, how much knowledge does a society need as a whole in order to function in a way that keeps the majority of people happy?

I recently was watching a documentary on one of those primitive, almost Stone Age tribes in Africa where they basically have only the knowledge they need to feed themselves, provide some shelter from rain and keep human society amongst themselves. The latter is what impressed me the most. When looked at in detail, these people had the same basic hopes and dreams, petty arguments, love triangles, jealousies, ego trips, love for family and friends, etc. that you would find underlying any modern society; the details based on their living conditions were the only difference. So is the knowledge of how to replace a hard drive in a laptop important to them? Of course not. They all had smiles on their weathered faces, and the children still laughed and played games happily around the fire.

I was (briefly) watching one of those tabloid shows where they were sort of making fun of certain model types who would say stupid things in response to geography questions like, "I thought Europe was a country! Oops." We all laugh in horror at the ditsy girl's lack of knowledge, but at the same time she looked quite healthy and seemed to be surviving quite nicely in her relative ignorance. But everyone can't be like that; it's the fact that our society bolsters her survival based on a complex value system which allows her to live without "knowing things". This also shows us that because our society is very established, we can go after very specialized knowledge and 'skip the boring stuff' if we choose, and still perhaps be successful.

As far as intertwined societies are concerned, knowledge is power. When you begin to have a fear that someone is going to attack you and take the means by which you survive, you begin to create ways to stop them. What maybe kept the aboriginal tribe primitive was the fact that no one bothered their survival. We also strive for more knowledge because even within our own societies the power of knowing more than the next guy gets us better jobs, homes, and cool stuff.

So as a theoretical answer, our present day knowledge is very oversaturated, but when you are driving on a highway, if everybody else is going 75, it's never a good idea to drive 30.