Is human nature inherently corrupt? Do we ‘lie like hell’? Facts lie and liars use facts. No offense here to the headstrong egocentrics but for the most part, as the old saying goes, “We don’t know the difference between our ass and a hole in the ground.”
‘So-called’ facts are nothing more than a consensus of opinion. So just because a bunch of so-called seemingly reliable people (experts) rule what is fact, in critical thinking to be sure of the accuracy of a fact, this means the fact should automatically be questioned, even challenged based on the only two metrics of scientific verification, validity and reliability. This is because facts change and the only thing constant IS change.
The ancient astronomer, Galileo, discovered the world revolved around the sun but the ruling powers at the time said the only fact the experts accept is the Earth is at the center of the universe. For even trying to get those in power to consider the fact that his unusual theory was correct, Galileo was imprisoned, branded a heretic until he died. It was not until 200 years later that the fact had changed and the Earth was discovered to revolve around the sun. Galileo was at last vindicated making history and today no one even really remembers those who ruled that the Earth was at the center of the universe. As the old saying goes and true to this day, “Might makes right” and ‘so-called’ facts are used to rule. The winners write the history no matter how deceiving the facts are.
So who and what can you trust? After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 starting World War II for America, based on what he thought was the fact that the Japanese were spies, President Roosevelt (FDR) rounded up all Japanese on the West Coast in the U.S. and no matter if they were U.S. citizens or not they were put into camps whereupon they lost all their rights, their wealth was confiscated and they were not allowed to work or earn a living…basically they were shut down.
The Nazis in Germany, during World War II, rounded up the Jews, cancelled their culture, silenced them and stripped them of everything then put them into ghettos and years later exterminated them based on facts as they saw them.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union during the late 20th Century, the facts were used to justify the reaction of the Soviet government to ‘crackdown’ on the unruly opposition to erase them from existence. The joke in the Soviet Union at that time was ‘under an authoritarian government we know what the future will be but we don’t know what the past was because it’s always changing’ (meaning the past is always being erased and re-written.) History judged all of the above events were extremely bad decisions based on facts believed at the time and millions of people suffered and died as a result.
Here is another fact measured by historians and waiting to be proven wrong but, so far, proven over time to be valid and reliable and thus true in American history. Every famous American hero known for their battlefield heroics throughout American history has been documented as someone who grew up in a rural setting with a gun in their hand. Cancel and eliminate this culture and so goes future battlefield heroics?
Today, the growing fact-finding, fact-checking industry has been developed to create facts masquerading as research to legitimize policy positions and/or agenda objectives resulting in the overuse and misuse of facts. Facts, nowadays, commonly revolve around cost, effectiveness, or risk, rather than around the intrinsic merits of the facts.
So how do we teach to discern or learn if facts are to be believed? It may not be easy and will be time consuming but put your ‘thinking cap’ on and submit facts to analysis and critical thought.
When fact-finding, fact-checking for serious decision making, every fact should clearly identify ‘the sponsor’ of the fact and describe the sponsor’s vested interest in the consequences and impact of imparting the fact to the public. If the sponsor is, for the most part, of unknown origin, or its name is disguised by a virtuous, public service sounding moniker, then the sponsor must be thoroughly researched for covert ties to hidden agendas being promoted by 3rd party partisans, or risk getting ‘played for a sucker.’ As they say ‘a sucker is born every minute’…making us all uninformed, ill-informed, misled ‘suckers’ for the most part.
We produce and promote facts that serve only to feed our own self interest, or the self interests of others we are loyal to, or those we have been ‘duped’ into teaming up with. Valid and reliable facts rely on substance and less on personalities and politics. However, due to human nature this is unrealistic to expect due to our inability to concentrate for long periods of time, or simply by not taking the time to focus making relying on substance to determine facts nearly impossible.
Human nature is inherently biased no matter who it is. Built-in bias is inescapable. Beware trusting anyone who says, “The fact of the matter is…,” or “In fact…” because no one is ever in command of ALL the facts to make a sound decision and fair judgment. Critical thinking requires being able to fairly and accurately interpret a fact objectively. Otherwise we end up with facts that have been filtered and presented to us by sophisticated minds that are more than willing to try and persuade us into BELIEVING that they KNOW the facts.
Facts are corrupt and troubled. Corrupt not so much in the sense like bribery is corrupt but corrupt in a systemic sense. Facts fail the revelation, the moral and the expectation test meaning facts fail to do what facts claim to reveal, and fail to do what facts should do, and what we expect facts to do.
Facts are spewed and weaved into a web intertwined into a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Facts are used to dramatize and used to appear to be responding to the issue or crisis at hand. Too often, the facts are not really facts but are fabrications. Facts are used to ensnare us through a symbiotic web of lies that mislead, so much so that we are unable to tell what is true and thus we are unable to make decisions effectively.
So what do we do then? We tend to simply ‘shoot from the hip’…we ‘wing it’. We will not admit this because it makes us feel and sound ill-equipped and unknowing and our ego generally cannot accept this because we have so much information at our fingertips these days we actually convince ourselves and come across to others that we are all-knowing, or know enough…and the wise person knows for a fact that we never can know enough.
Facts are used for posturing, as a smoke screen because we do not dig very deep to find Good or Truth or tackle a problem. Facts are used to create a charade that serve our own self-interests and mislead, and those loyal to us oblige the fabrication and thus stage-manage their own responses to enhance their own prestige and power making many of us ‘legends in our own minds.’ In ‘street language’ this is called ‘doctor feel-good’.
Then others we have convincingly, consciously or unconsciously, misled read and report these fabrications to others, and so goes the continued filtering of facts. If we really took the time to think about it, all parties involved know the facts being spewed are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform, failing the ultimate test for determining a fact: validity and reliability.
Over 2000 years of recorded critical thought, what has emerged is a culture of lying. The culture of lying is the discourse and behavior of seeking to enlist the necessary power to reach a goal and, if possible, to satisfy our own ego to elicit a desired response from others. The result is a distortion that must continually convince ourselves and others to resolve, or appear to resolve, in what our morality-seeking superego must have: a powerful, permanent mode of operation to address the world around us.
We have become adept at promoting the version of reality we want ourselves and others to believe. To deflect critics we routinely use persuasion and image making to attract and/or promote our self-interests. Do not blame others. We are the prominent players in the manipulation of facts and perception resulting in the corruption of the process of fact-finding and fact-checking.
Today, to ensure we make the points and counterpoints, facts are ‘scripted’ to make the argument we wish to make, literally performing the script in a politically correct way saying what was almost never what we REALLY think but what we want others to think. Today, it is risky even dangerous to oppose, so we cynically lie.
Today, we have a dual identity, an external facade and an internal reality, much like the Japanese duality of appearance and reality. On the surface there is a made-up public story put out for the purpose of manipulating others in ways favorable to the story maker. However, behind this is another story under the surface, known to those immediately involved and to outsiders with the knowledge to be able to decode it. On the surface it is about the making of the story for public consumption for the almighty, altruistic common good but under the surface it is about the private objectives it is meant to advance. The two stories, or realities, are often wildly at odds with each other.
In the real world, facts are used to promote public illusions and private privilege. Facts corrupt the process and the public’s perceptions. Facts are used to ‘fire up’ the dueling parties with drama, conflict and quotable advocates, but in turn, facts fail to discover or report the underlying realities. We push facts that may contain elements of the truth to persuade but never the whole truth from both sides of an issue. Facts are used to cover, in detail, the competing propaganda of the conflicting interests but the facts used largely neglect to reveal the unifying ‘substance’ of the issue in conflict.
We focus on facts as manipulators and their machinations (plots and schemes) rather than on clarifying substantive issues and this is perhaps unavoidable because it reflects several aspects of our culture. Personalities are more compelling than institutions. Facts are uncertain and conceivably just as confusing as they are clarifying. Attention spans are brief, and simplification—often oversimplification—is the norm.
Focusing on facts as facades or false appearances has several consequences. Facts change perceptions and perceptions become reality. Misuse of facts includes leaks, innuendos, and stories planted to hurt us; misused information that may lead to our loss of influence, resignations or dismissals from our jobs and loss of standing in the community.
Facts spread by credible sources may be nothing more than rumor, innuendo and/or allegations spread in every way imaginable to change perception into reality. Once it is believed and gets repeated and spread day after day, year after year, then it may be considered to be accurate and true and thus written into history.
The willingness to spread facts changes perception into reality. The mere appearance of a disparaging and/or fabricated fact changes perceptions and, unless effectively rebutted, will change reality and the truth; and misguided perceptions quickly affect policy decisions void of critical thought and subsequent fair judgment. Speculation in our society has a way of becoming fact.
Facts are consciously or unconsciously filtered and twisted to be used as propaganda. The consequence of propaganda is that the public’s confidence in all institutions gradually erodes. As people realize they are being misled, manipulated, and lied to…they resent it and rebel.
Today, we mostly only respond to ‘drama’ conveyed through simple pictures and/or video. If it is not ‘drama’ it is too complex, or just too boring to deal with, or ‘get into’, or make an effort to understand, and consequently we are unwilling or unable to respond. Like ‘rubbernecking’ a car wreck, we focus on crises and conflicts which reveal ‘surface’ consequences and we become blind to the ‘systemic’ issues causing or contributing to the crises and conflicts. Riots and earthquakes are easy to ‘get into’, focus on and understand but non-dramatic, long term, crucial ‘trends are hard to package’ into easy to understand pictures. We are generally quick to ‘record’ consequences but too often slow to ‘respond’ to consequences.
We are too willing to accept facts. Facts are used to distract rather than inform. Fact has fallen victim to the ‘man-bites-dog’ fallacy meaning the real world is falsified and degenerates into deceit, manipulation, and exploitation.”
Facts are used to knowingly or unknowingly lie so rely on critical thinking skills including reason, knowledge, experience, intuition, ‘vibes’ (vibrations), and common sense when forming opinions. If you do not possess critical thinking skills you may easily be persuaded by someone else’s ‘stories’ filtered to appear as fact. We are already wary of making decisions based on opinion or belief but these days we are increasingly asked to believe any assertion that is supported by statistical research. However, be reluctant of believing statistical research because statistics lie and liars use statistics.
Facts are ‘twisted’ and used to persuade us to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal and have been created NOT to expand our knowledge but to SELL a product, a policy, an idea or advance a cause.
The growing fact-finding, fact-checking industry overuses and misuses facts and has thus been developed to create facts masquerading as research to legitimize policy positions and/or agenda objectives. Facts, nowadays, commonly revolve around cost, effectiveness, or risk, rather than around the intrinsic merits of the facts.
Since we are ill-equipped to judge if a fact is really a fact, we rely on having faith in the facts we choose to believe even though we do not know ‘absolutely for sure’ that they are factual which gives misguided facts impact, even when the facts contradict common sense. This makes facts patently self-serving to promote what we ‘want’ to believe or convince ourselves of. Beware of convincing yourself about that which is questionable. A fact, generally, is not fully explained but if a fact promises to be entertaining then that is good enough for many readers to regard it as factual.
Opinion polls/surveys are the most invalid and unreliable of all scientific research instruments because how questions are worded and how samples are chosen can have a huge impact on the responses provided by respondents, so we end up with ‘slanted’, inaccurate, invalid, unreliable facts. We love polls and surveys even if they are scientifically, socially, or economically meaningless. They basically manufacture facts. Concocted or inaccurate facts taint our perceptions of what is true, and thus distort reality.
Our inherent desire for drama encourages distortion and corruption of decision making. In effect we are willing victims of bad information, and increasingly we are producers of it. We take information, masquerading as fact, from self-interested parties and add to it another layer of self-interest—the desire to sell it to others as fact. It is an egotistical, ‘makes me feel right and good’ proposition.
Equally unrealistic is trying to establish a culture of responsibility and deliberation. Anyone who has ever analyzed their own thinking habits and behavior knows how far this notion is from reality.
You would think access to more and more information would make fact-finding and fact-checking all the more easier but the result is too much conflicting information is discovered which is not likely to alter the persistence of a difficult problem at hand. In such an environment, right or wrong, good or bad, consciously or unconsciously, the actors who most skillfully create and manipulate facts determine the direction of changing hearts and minds.
To change the ways we determine facts needs to be revolutionary and over time would reduce the pressures on us to respond instantly with snap judgments due to the time and space constraints we constantly impose on ourselves. For some years to come, however, we are likely to get more ‘fact propagandists’, not fewer.
If the facts were clear and decisive then why are so many ‘front line’ health care workers refusing to get virus vaccines especially during the pandemic of 2020? They are uncertain and do not trust the facts being presented about the vaccine. So why not inform the public and debate it? Unfortunately, debate exposes all the ‘warts’ of any issue and this could spawn even further suspicion and rejection, so like gangsters say, “Why take a chance?”
However, since the 1700s in America, debates informed the public on divisive issues. However, starting in the 1970s that power was taken away from the masses by the ‘power brokers’ in the two mainstream political parties in America which, to date, continue to maintain their stranglehold on the public through divisiveness and oppressing information. Americans have not had public debate aired on commercial-free Public Broadcasting TV Stations (PBS) since the 1970s which, you could say, is when divisiveness chose us and became our national ‘calling’..
Facts constantly change because new information is being revealed all the time that requires more in-depth thought and research to validate new facts if they are to become reliable. Results are always to be critiqued on the only two merits that count in testing facts: validity and reliability.
However, human nature is inherently biased and we will never escape this. Time and space constraints filter what facts we believe and/or spew to others which too often leave out fair judgment of both sides of an issue, as well as all the shades of grey in between, all of which best suits our own inherently biased needs and desires.
During 2020 in America, we have the ruling classes using facts to put the opposition into a ‘digital ghetto’ to take away their freedoms. In a free country the only non-violent speech worth defending is the speech we despise…or we are not truly free. Classic liberalism used to be about protecting the rights of the weakest which equals the measure of just how free we are. However, political progressives in charge of America today are not liberal, in the classic sense of the definition, but lean more authoritarian which throughout history has bred revolution and unrest.
With restricted speech and too little room for open debate for fact-finding, fact-checking it is, in effect, ‘a knee on the neck’ of freedom of discourse, and if freedom cannot breathe we are not allowed all the information necessary to make a fair judgment. Consequently there is no conviction which breeds suspicion and distrust.
Today in America the facts to be believed are what the ruling political parties believe and if working middle class Americans do not adopt or adapt to those facts they will surreptitiously be excluded from the political process by the ruling classes, including the political elite, corporate conglomerates and others. However, the U.S. Constitution guarantees the corporation cannot curtail or discriminate against the liberty and basic rights of the press, religion or commerce. Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion so said the U.S. Supreme Court in 1946. If we support a system of exclusion and not stand up for non-violent free speech and the rights for all then we are standing for tyranny…not freedom.
Where there is tyranny eventually there is rebellion and unrest. For example, in America during 2021, the working middle class producing and delivering ‘essential’ goods and services, like food and oil, may choose ‘peaceful insurrection’ and refuse delivery of essential goods and services to ‘targeted’ regions in America like some areas in the far west and northeastern states. Furthermore, in cities with lackluster support for law and order we may experience ‘targeted sick-outs’ by the middle class, rank and file in law enforcement.
This retaliation against the big tech Silicon Valley, Wall Street and political elitists, and some international corporate conglomerates, would be for the west coast and east coast ‘rich man’s careless response contributing to the needless downfall of small business and their employees during the pandemic of 2020 branding small business in America as ‘non-essential’ and left for dead by BOTH ruling political parties.
Retaliation would also be for the ‘rich man’s’ contribution to inhibiting free speech and contribution inhibiting the free flow of ideas demanded by middle class Americans by figuratively, and we do mean figuratively, by big business’s, Wall Street’s and politicians’ putting their ‘knees on the necks’ of middle class Americans so they cannot breathe. Consequently, we may witness civil unrest and a peaceful revolution unheard of in America since the Vietnam War protests during the 1960s. Of course the only way civil unrest and a peaceful revolution could ever be supported by the working middle class in America is if it is mandated to take place without ANY of the violence and bloodshed witnessed during the Vietnam War protests or during the violent protests across America in 2020. A specifically targeted, peaceful labor ‘strike’ without violence may be necessary. This is the rumor floating around middle class America these days to retaliate with a ‘peaceful insurrection’ against the privileged ‘f__k_g rich man’ in America.
Carrying it a step further, America is the only country in the free world with a two party political system. The two mainstream political parties and corporate America, which owns the mainstream news media, will not allow more diverse political parties to be heard. The great risk to freedom in America is if we can nullify one of the two dominant political parties we then have one party rule which is no better than a dictatorship thus breeding unrest and revolution that some predict will occur sometime from 2020 to 2030 in what is commonly called the “fourth turning”.
No one political party, much less two parties, can satisfy the needs of all segments of American society. Germany has no less than 6 political parties with representatives from all 6 parties holding elected office in their government. Brazil has 100 parties and even Ireland, with only a few million citizens, has 8 political parties all with elected representation in their governments.
Making matters worse is when voting in a two party political system we are not allowed to vote for no more than one candidate to hold a particular office. This leaves voters with essentially just two potentially poisonous choices. Voting for more than one candidate to hold a particular office allows voters a chance to ‘vote their conscience’ instead of having to ‘pick their poison’ choosing between just two candidates from just two parties. Critics charge this is like choosing between two candidates that are basically nothing more than ‘opposite banks along the same poisoned stream’. The current dominant two party political ‘boondoggle’ in America allows the two parties to exclude other opposition parties while at the same time ‘protecting their own’ by continuing to enrich themselves and their families with perks, sweetheart deals and taxpayer dollars ‘for life’ all at the expense of taxpayers.
The bottom line? A difference of opinion about facts must still be based on ‘principle’ which will stand up against the test of time. A fact in principle is based on validity, meaning it must truly measure what you are trying to measure; and reliability so you can count on its accuracy over time. Valid and reliable facts are then used to construct and build sound decisions. Anything less is destructive and inhibits and/or prohibits sound decisions.
SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCES: THE BOOK: NEWS AND THE CULTURE OF LYING BY PAUL WEAVER, 1994 and THE BOOK: WHO STOLE THE NEWS BY MORT ROSENBLUM, 1993 and THE BOOK: TAINTED TRUTH, THE MANIPULATION OF FACT IN AMERICA BY CYNTHIA CROSSEN, 1994