Viewing a blue world with rose tinted lenses
I am sure you've heard this before, but if you haven't, you're in for a surprise. I will conjure and present this as a "statistic" that will hold true; 'Everyone that drinks the chemical known as dihydrogen monoxide will die'. It is an unshakeable fact, one that does not contain any misinformation, medical or otherwise.
The statement that I have made, as preposterous as it sounds, has been framed in a specific way that presents water (H2O) as a chemical that many people may not be familiar with, and created fear, uncertainty and doubt around it to evoke an emotion. Even people who do know what it was, the statement may suggest that there is a causation between drinking water and dying due to the way the statement is made. Then, there are those that will waste time arguing on the granular details of correlation vs causation and regurgitate things that they were indoctrinated to think.
We view the world with our presuppositions, biases and preconceived notions. As much as we tend to argue we don't believe one way or another, we are not empty slates.
Digging heels deeper into the sand.
My demonstration of the earlier statement, even though in jest, is a real communication strategy in business. The way the truth is framed is surgically intended for an audience through centralised mediums. We are nothing but target segments, and in many ways benignly so. Businesses need to serve us products that we find useful, and some of us will find some products more useful than others. Understandably, in the pursuit of victory through ruthless competition, some companies may engage and leverage off of more nefarious means to herd opinions.
Millions of businesses, institutions, positions of power and movements all send a barrage of relentless powerful messaging constantly, while the tragedy of our own fears of shame that being wrong brings us, in turn inflates our ego with faux-knowledge. Many, go through life with apathy towards this severely constructed reality, enslaved by our desperate need for acceptance, conformity and safety. We have outsourced critical thinking to the experts, dismiss intuition that took millions of years of evolution and beg for prescriptive caution that we are incapable of taking ourselves.
Perhaps ignorance is bliss, but history time and again proves that is not true. Ignorance has always been a precondition to personal calamity.
Learning to trust yourself, again.
How do you learn to discern what is true if everything you see is a veil of carefully curated patterns? My answer would be your experience. Life is not a prescriptive list of so called 'rational' choices people get to make for you to live. Life, is a phenomena meant to be experienced deeply by you. We are all fools, even the ones that tell you otherwise of themselves. Most of your prescriptions come from someone who have not lived your life (or arguably even experienced life), your baggage, your unique experiences. Things that only you have the vested interest to see through till the very end, for yourself and the people you love.
We live in a time where 'experts' argue for a deterministic universe and demean your will and power for individual agency over your own actions, when the truth is both stranger and contradictory than a singular 'scientific' belief. As a species that wrestles with an unfathomable part of consciousness not seen anywhere in the world but within ourselves, it is upon us to act accordingly and in harmony with nature. It is upon us, to embrace truth and truthful living and experience life for what it truly is.
Because the nature of truth, is that truth reveals itself, especially as you experience it.