There's a whole world of trouble out there. Everywhere is conflict and I don't just mean violence. Happily my life and the lives of the majority of my peers are thus far, mostly free from violence. But we are daily assaulted by other conflicts, especially conflicts of information.
Dividing information down to its two main strains: the experienced and the received, in the "information age" the latter category greatly outweighs the former, probably for the first time in history. We know more about the world out there, about places we've never been, about people we've never met, and events completely alien to our own lives than ever before.
Now, that can be a good thing. Information, as we know translates nicely into knowledge for us and enriches our lives, or so it would, were it not for conflict. Now this problem arises predominantly in the realm of received knowledge. That which we experience for ourselves we seldom dispute, but received information, be it via word of mouth or through media, is just a witness report. It might be wrong. It might be deliberately misleading. It might be a misinterpretation of fact. It might be downright lies.
Confronted with the reality that we are not in a position to ascertain absolute truth on any matter, stuck as we are with limited time, limited money and limited energy, we make decisions. We decide, in effect, who are our reliable witnesses and who aren't. We are forced to choose who to believe.
Now that choice will be coloured by many factors about us, our lives, our inherent beliefs and our previous experiences, and that most enigmatic of fellows, our intuition. Take the following example. Two cars collide at a crossroads. There are only two people to witness the scene: a drunk and a lawyer. They both give conflicting accounts of the crash. The drunk, we assume was probably cognitively impaired; the lawyer, probably morally impaired. Add to the maelstrom that one of them is black and one of them Irish, and like it or not, it just got further complicated for you, because yes, everybody prejudges, everybody is prejudiced to stereotype.
So who do we trust? Is an Irish drunk more reliable than a black lawyer? Is a black drunk more reliable than an Irish lawyer? Add to it all that unknown factor of human fallibility which varies in all of us but is present in all of us, nonetheless, and our assumptions are all but worthless.
We may even be forced to conclude they are both unreliable and that the truth lies somewhere between their two accounts or nowhere near either.
So, to take this example and put it in context, every day we are bombarded with received information, mostly via the media: tv, radio, internet, newspapers etc. They have owners who in turn have imperatives (to make money, to keep a reputation, to advance an agenda etc.). We know that these imperatives influence in detail and in general the layout of their information, the tone, the level of detail, the level of prominence and indeed, whether or not information is imparted or not.
In the UK, it used to be the case (not so much any more), left-wing, labour voters would read the Guardian; right-wing Conservative voters, the Times, or Telegraph. Interesting, because they all covered pretty much the same stories. They can't both have been correct. Perhaps the Guardian was more accurate some days, perhaps on others the Times got closer to reality, but the point for the reader was that they liked the version of facts given to them by one or the other because it fitted with a reality they wanted to perceive.
What I am saying, in a nutshell is an old idea: people believe what they want to believe. And this concept is far more nefarious than we imagine, because in our cosetted, non-violent, affluent lives we are not confronted with horrible truths that we must deny or confront on a daily basis, to the detriment of ourselves or others. We are not a middle-class family from Dachau in 1942. "Where does daddy work?" asks the kid. "At a factory," mum replies. And "at a factory" is probably the way dad sees it too, because he does not necessarily feel comfortable with the fact that he is a guard at a forced labour camp, and people are dying. In such extremes, believing what we want to believe allows horrors to happen. The case becomes simply, Denial.
For a few hundred years blacks had few civil rights in the USA. They were enslaved, abused and sidelined. In their daily lives they experienced the contempt of the white man. Then came civil rights, protests, the 60s, emancipation. On paper at least, equality arrived and since that time people of black ancestry have literally risen to the highest offices and positions in the land. And yet, when a certain Mr X., a black man in New Orleans, fails to get the job he wanted he goes home and tells his wife it was because the interviewer was racially biased. In fact, he was the least qualified for the job, but centuries of prejudice tainted his perception. The case becomes simply, Paranoia.
So, Denial, the unwillingness to confront a horror, that we cannot or simply don't want to accept. Paranoia, perceiving horrors where there are none, because we've experienced them before and we expect them to happen again. The gap between them, of course, lies in whether we perceive a victim. The denier refutes it, the paranoid insists upon it. The denier is really refuting his own culpability, the paranoid avoiding his own responsibility.
Back to our modern scenario. The world is complex. Horrors are happening. Politicians lie to us, the media lie to us, even our spouses lie to us, but not all the time. Sources conflict, contradict, a lot of the time. Our lifestyle, experience, character and role will colour whom we choose to believe. Just how reliable is the picture of reality we have constructed in our minds? Certainly not completely reliable, and probably not even very.
Every so often some scandal or revelation will erupt and people will be shocked. "Who would have thought it?", "I never would have guessed", "It can't be true, it's impossible". We might be wise to take these as choice reminders that our witness reports are always subject to doubt. And yet, the very next day, most of us probably slip back into out old belief system, the one that replaces doubt with trust, just because it's comfortable, because it reassures us. Once again, we'll be believing what we want to believe and it's a rare individual that can step outside that frame.
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