There is an old saying that says ignorance is bliss. This certainly true in certain cases knowing the truth will only make you suffer, or put you in danger. I think that everything in a balance way is healthy and beneficial for you even ignorance.
The problem is when staying ignorant makes you suffer and to self-sabotage. This is why ignorance is something to be practiced in moderation.
There are two ways to be ignorant:
- The first way to maintain someone in a state of ignorance is to deprive him or her of information. In the absence of valuable information this people are not going to take very good decision because they simply don't know about the negative consequences of their actions.
A good example of this is smoking until a certain point there wasn't enough information about nocive effects of the smoking has on the human body. So the people that smoked and damaged their health weren't fully responsible about it because they weren't aware about what exactly they were doing to themselves.
This form of ignorance can last a very long time especially when someone is profiting out of your action for as long as you are ignorant. This is what happened with the tobacco companies that buried a lot of the research that linked smoking with cancer and hire doctors to appear on TV programs to lye to people in order to confuse them. This disable the ability of the people to take the best decisions for themselves, so they don't have free-will.
- The second type of ignorance happens when someone have all the necessary information to take the best decisions but rejects the facts and and keeps taking bad decisions, this is commonly known as denial.
The denial is maintained to a series of mechanism like: justification or avoidance. This are relay just very elaborated ways of lying to yourself, the way out of denial is to be honest with yourself. Not as commonly believed, that in order to get out of denial is to reach rock bottom. It is true that some people when they are faced with the hard consequences of their actions are more likely to be honest with themselves and then their behavior changes. But is the honesty that changes their emotions that ultimately changes their behaviors. You don't have to wait until your life is destroyed to take action.
By lying to yourself and diminishing the perception of the negative consequences of your actions, you are making yourself feel good when you do bad things. And this is why your emotions don't work, if you would ask me all mental recovering processes have to start with telling the truth.