In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as its word of the year, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
As we charge into 2019, I would suggest nothing’s changed. In fact, if anything, appeals to emotion and personal belief continue to disproportionately influence rational thought and unquestionably rampage social media.
Such emotional appeals precede a significant portion of the board of commissioners’ proceedings; especially evident whenever funding requests show up on the agenda.
Nineteenth century Russian playwright Anton Chekhov theorized, “Man is what he believes.” Anton’s certainly not the first to forward this notion. Wise King Solomon essentially penned the same concept 2,800 years earlier, in his compilation of proverbs, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”
“All of us have our own set of beliefs that shape our lives,” suggests Daniela Naidu, who with her husband David co-founded SkilledAtLife.com. “This set of beliefs affects what we think about ourselves, others, and the world at large. It also greatly influences our emotions and actions. That is why beliefs are so important and worth examining and understanding . . . we use our beliefs to navigate this world.
“Our beliefs serve to function as our subconscious autopilot. Once formed, these beliefs become ingrained in us. We take them for granted, and we also assume our beliefs to be factual, whether they actually are true or not.”
Personally, I’ve observed that much of what we’ve come to believe has been heavily orchestrated. In some cases this may be healthy, in other scenarios it’s foundationally destructive . . . all depends on your point of view; i.e., what a person believes.
English dramatist Philip Massinger, in his finely plotted play Believe What You Will, which debuted in 1631 (I wasn’t able to attend), suggests citizens of an autocratic state sometimes have little option but to assume the veracity of what they are told. At the heart of the play, Antiochus (a persecuted, refugee warrior king) laments, “You must not see the sun, if in policy of state, it is forbidden.”
Here at the local level, despite our state’s “sunshine law,” we citizens are living the reality of the refugee warrior-king’s words. It is embarrassingly evident the county administrator and commissioners are performing all the mental gymnastics it takes to not only remain convinced that they’re right, but also “Pied Piper” the community into believing so.
You might even say they are heavily engaged in what is referred to as motivated reasoning: an emotion-biased decision-making phenomenon studied in cognitive science and social psychology (I know, it’s a mouthful).
It’s often employed as a way to avoid or lessen cognitive dissonance (the mental discomfort a person experiences when confronted by contradictory information). Motivated reasoning is how people convince themselves–or remain convinced–of what they want to believe.
Inordinate amounts of time and energy are invested in seeking out agreeable information, while on the other hand they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs. One could conclude they’ve constructed a pillow fort made up of the information they find comfortable.
Usually people don’t keep themselves totally ensconced in a cushiony cave. They build windows in the fort, they peek out from time to time, they venture out into the real world and encounter information that suggests something they believe is wrong.
Lee McIntyre, a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, believes that survival–fitting in and being accepted–becomes more important than discovering truth. He’s ascertained,
“Having social support, from an evolutionary standpoint, is far more important than knowing the truth.”
McIntyre takes a similarly moralistic tone in his 2015 book Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age. “The real enemy of truth is not ignorance, doubt, or even disbelief,” he writes. “It is false knowledge. In the past, one might have thought of ignorance as the absence of correct information; today it seems just as likely to consist of the presence of false information. For the first time since the Dark Ages, I believe that disrespect for truth has the global power to threaten our way of life on this planet.”
Wow! That’s Buck Rogers stuff!
Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic, writes in a March 2017 issue, “Part of the problem is that society has advanced to the point that believing what’s true often means accepting things you don’t have any firsthand experience of and that you may not completely understand.
“So much of how people view the world has nothing to do with facts. That doesn’t mean truth is doomed, or even that people can’t change their minds. But what all this does seem to suggest is that, no matter how strong the evidence is, there’s little chance of it changing someone’s mind if they really don’t want to believe what it says. They have to change their own,” concludes Beck.
I’ve mentioned before, when my wife and I first arrived in Grand Marais, I noticed a number of cars displaying bumper stickers that read, “Seek Truth.” I saw this as a good sign; however, I’ve found many are only willing to seek the “truth” that is compatible with the culture in which we live.
The Apostle Paul, in his long letter to the Romans, cautioned, “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.”
And the hospitable folks in Beroea–a small Greek community north of Mount Olympus–weren’t dismissive to Paul’s counsel; but neither did they naively take him at his word . . . “they examined the Scriptures to see if they supported what he said.”
Hmm . . . “they examined.”
We could use more “examining” of what we are being told. After all, it could become inherent to what we choose to believe.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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