The Fine and Rare Art of Trying to Understand
At the time of writing this, America as a society is shattered, the world is watching on in a mix of amusement and vicarious shame, and China and Russia are loading the bases.
The lines between fact and fiction have become distorted and the average person in the street is infected with so much disingenuous misinformation and bizarre conspiracy theory it is almost impossible to discern what it true and how to coax the spirit of reasoning and unity out of such a divided and enlivened populace.
Finding clarity is now the act of threading a series of misaligned needles with the susceptible thread of unbiased truth, deliberately re-inviting and ushering critical thinking back to the table, keeping our cognitive biases in check and an open minded imagination on warm standby.
Truth does exist,
but it is not easy to get at, because of all the noise, our human weaknesses (that being our cognitive biases, our limited bandwidth), the relentless firehose of information, misinformation, and distraction, Dunning-Kruger effect, framing, priming; all well know facts about the poverty of human reasoning.
Our ability to become triggered, our propensity for conflation, our ability to mishear and misremember, and more importantly a mistrust of government, experts and journalism, which if we are honest with ourselves, we did not arrive at dishonestly, are all warning signs, which we should factor in during times like these, and yet we pretend they don’t exist, like a child who imagines they become invisible when they close their eyes.
I don’t want to tell people what to think, I want to encourage people to consider on how to think. I don’t claim my insights are the only way, I am contending that there are worse and better ways to navigate problems and troubling times.
the dire state
we are all now in,
makes us feel, instinctively
that immediate response
immediate reaction
immediate broadcast of our opinion
is what is most needed.
it is time, then, now more than ever, to
go against ourselves, and observe grace
before we speak, before we act.
so we can be part of a solution
instead of being part of
the problem.
I am responsible for this same phenomenon, and my instincts, in situations like we are in right now, where we feel people desperately need help, correction, advice, sanity, a reminder of compassion; When we feel our silence cannot continue in the face of such a miscarriage of human values, and that the noise and misinformation is making everything worse, and everyone desperately needs your 10c contribution, or that you aren’t even aware of being driven by your impulses.
This means, more than ever before, it becomes prudent to sit, a moment, in your own discomfort, recognise your own impulses, check your emotions, invite critical thinking and a broader, mindful compassion, not raw empathy, back into the room. Gather your thoughts, see the other side, see both sides, see past the false dichotomy, and then decide how best to weigh in.
It should be like this with all relationships, all debate, all public and online discourse.
Inaction and a blind commitment to passivity are of course not the best response, but neither is broadcasting our emotional ejaculation, unmoderated by stillness, compassion, reflection and grace.
It seems counterintuitive, but that is my point, our instinctive and triggered intuitions are not the place we want to act from. This is a bug, not a feature.
The noise will build now.
Nothing will be clear,
the bright line between fact and fiction has been blurred beyond the point of discernment for any but the most awakened.
We are generating more noise, more angry tweets, more vapid Instagram posts, more spiritual junk food, clogging the system with repeated quotes, tik-toks, memes.
The discomfort will increase now until there is nowhere left where we can look where we can look away.
And we will keep looking away. Wishing messages like this to be gentler, nicer, more positive. We will try and bury ourselves in our work, sport, music, porn, arguments, petty drama, mindless entertainment.
We will fiddle as Rome burns.
And as our discomforts increase we will look for people to blame. For scapegoats.
For we are all infected by Shame.
We can still unfuck this timeline, but we need to wake up to participate meaningfully and we need to have the courage to sit with our discomforts, and the wisdom, at last, to do what we have never been able to do.