Episode 16: THE INDEPENDENT AND UNBIASED INVESTIGATION OF TRUTH as an expression of the principle of justice

In this episode we explore the principle of the independent and unbiased investigation of truth as an expression of the principle of justice and an effective way to immunize ourselves against unwitting manipulation, self-sabotage, and polarization.

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we explore the principle of the independent and unbiased investigation of truth as an expression of the principle of justice and an effective way to immunize ourselves against unwitting manipulation, self sabotage, and polarization. Lately, it seems that the universe has been determined to unearth many of our bad habits and fling them in our faces. There's another way to look at the same phenomenon, however, and that is that the universe is actually being incredibly kind and merciful to us, giving us opportunities to uncover outworn and dysfunctional habits and to determine, are they serving us or are they not serving us? We get to consider whether we want to replace them with something more empowering or not. One of the habits that repeatedly stares us in the eye and that we really can't ignore anymore, we've got to decide what we're going to do about it, is this habit of abdicating our responsibility to discern truth. What we tend to do instead is to swallow wholesale information that is fed to us, regardless of the reliability of the source. We've gotten to the point where we really can no longer escape the reality that we've become prone to succumbing to rumor and baseless gossip and falsehood. There's an old adage which really is driven home in these times. It's been attributed to different people, including Jonathan Swift. It says, "A lie can travel halfway around the world, while the truth is still putting on its shoes." I think that's so apt to describe a lot of what we're experiencing these days. Now, unfortunately, this old habit isn't just a benign one. It's not like leaving our socks lying around the house. It actually has serious consequences. Let's look at a couple of them. One of them that we mentioned in one of the previous episodes in which we talked about the importance of electing fit and worthy leaders is that it causes us this habit of abdicating responsibility for discerning the truth about the character of the leaders we are planning to elect. It causes us to elect unfit leaders. We've already talked about the terrible consequences that flow from that for our wellbeing. The other thing that it does, the other negative impact it has and has had, is that it causes us to become polarized, as we succumb to sources of information that are put out there by folks intent on sowing disunity and creating division among us. What we end up doing is actually giving our power over to them and allow ourselves to become manipulated by other people for their own selfish ends. We just become pawns in their game. But we're allowing this to happen. The third thing that happens is that this habit leads us to make decisions about both our individual and collective destinies without the benefit of adequate facts and transparent information. And the outcome is usually something that does not serve us well. This risk of undesirable outcomes becomes exacerbated because we limit our spheres of information and influence to small echo chambers that continuously perpetuate the same set of ideas and perspectives within a small community, our community. This tendency limits our understanding of reality, which in turn then limits the range of choices that we perceive as being available to us, and ultimately leads to results that don't improve the situation. A couple of examples really jump to mind. One is the example of Brexit and the painful experience that the British people went through. You may recall that during the time when folks were about to vote in the referendum about whether to leave or stay in the European Union, there was a claim that was being made, and in fact it was plastered on the sides of buses that went around the city of London. And basically, these posters said, "Hey guys, look, we are bleeding basically 354 million British pounds a week to the EU, and if we were to leave the EU, we could reallocate those monies to a weak and ailing National Health Service." People of course understandably wanted the health service to be strong so that they would have adequate health care for their families, for their children, for their spouses, for their parents. And so they swallowed this what turned out to be misinformation and basically an outright lie. They swallowed it whole. Another example today that's still very present with us is the decision about whether or not to take the vaccines It's become unfortunately a very fraught issue. Instead of being a health issue, we have allowed it to become a politically charged question as opposed to a question about the survivability of the human race and how many more people we're willing to expend and allow to die because of this pandemic. And of course, the deleterious results on our economies. So we see that this habit of abdicating responsibility to discern the truth actually has huge impacts, including impacts that have life or death consequences for us. This is not just a minor topic that is esoteric. Now, one of the things, as I was reflecting on the subject, that I was thinking about is, Okay. So we've been talking a lot in these sessions about the importance of accepting responsibility for where we find ourselves before we can then determine where we want to end up and how we get there. But first we have to embrace the fact that the choices that we've made until now have not been empowering and constructive choices. So What's been going on and why have we gotten into this habit? Where did it come from? This is my own personal belief and I'd be really interested in hearing your comments. So please throw things into the chat. As I speak I'd love to hear what your views are so we can have a conversation about this. To me it appears that this holdover of an age old practice that we humans have had of accepting what clergy tell us without question. For centuries, people of all different religious backgrounds have relied on their clergy to tell them what information that is delivered from the divine, from the highest source, actually means. We've given over our responsibility to try to understand the word of God, if you like, for ourselves to these folks who we view as intermediaries, who get to tell us what this or that passage or these or those words mean. Now in today's world, even though we've become a lot less religiously inclined in many parts of the world, this habit still seems to linger on. We drag this residual habit with us of blindly following what somebody else tells us. And instead of necessarily having clergy as figureheads to whom we turn, we now turn to the media, or we turn to our political leaders, or we look to the ideologies that we embrace, or we look to various political policies. They play basically exactly the same role. If they say something, we take it to be the gospel truth and we then array ourselves on different sides of an argument based on our following. So we become the followers of a particular source of news or media or followers of a particular political party or political ideology. Now, humanity, as we've been discussing, has been going through various developmental stages of growth in its quest to attain the stage of maturity, of collective maturity. While this old habit of following what somebody else tells us we should believe and how we should think, may have been okay for the period in our collective lives when we were immature, it no longer serves us. Not only does it not serve us, it is actually harmful. We need a new habit to replace it, one that will serve us as we get to the age of maturity. As we get to the age of maturity, just as you see in the life of our children, as they get closer to being mature, they start to understand and we as parents start to understand that one of the greatest gifts that they have is the gift of discernment and understanding. They have to be able to see with their own eyes and not through our eyes. In similar fashion, we as a human race, each of us as individuals need to start honing the skill of seeing reality with our own eyes and discerning truth from falsehood, and to assess information without preconceived biases and prejudices. We need to start to discern what really resonates with us and what doesn't. Honing this skill becomes even more critical in today's world, where we're bombarded with so much conflicting information. If we fail to do this, what we're in fact allowing to happen is to allow people, whether it's the media or our politicians, to infantilize us, basically treat us as though we were infants. We essentially give away our power. At this stage in our collective growth, we need to be accorded the respect and we need to demand the respect of being allowed to understand the truth for ourselves without any intermediaries of either clergy or talking heads who drown us in their opinions as though they were the truth, capital T. In sum, the way I look at this question is that developing this skill of investigating and assessing truth and discerning it for ourselves is actually an expression of the principle of justice. The principles of justice and oneness, as we have also talked about during these episodes, are key principles and part of a shared set of global ethics that we all want our future world to be based upon. What tools do we have at our disposal to help us hone this skill, right? Cause we've now decided, "Hey, this is probably a really important skill at this stage in our development." So how are we going to hone this skill? Four things that come to mind. The first is using our common sense, the gift that we all have, the gift of our intellect and our mind. Good old fashioned common sense is remarkably hard to find these days. Sometimes we seem to park it at the door. I don't really understand why that is. But it's a good reminder that we each actually have a lot of common sense. Applying it. So when we hear somebody say something and we look at reality and common sense tells us that what they're saying doesn't actually mesh with what we're seeing with our own eyes, with our own common sense, we should actually factor our common sense in and trust it. Secondly, another tool that we have is consultation. Consultation is an amazing tool that essentially allows us to enhance our collective understanding and enables us to see things from various points of view. An analogy that I find is brilliant is the following. Imagine that you have a gem, an emerald or ruby or diamond, or whatever gem is your favorite. And that you have a group of friends around this gem, and you're each looking at different facets of it. Depending on where you're standing and how the light is hitting it, you may see the light reflected off the facet of the gem as blue, having a bluish hue. Your friend A may see yellowish shoe. Friend B may see a reddish shoe. I may see more of a pinkish hue. And so on. Now, we could either stand and argue with each other about which of us is right, or we could step into each other's shoes and go around and recognize, "Oh my gosh, depending on our perspectives and our filters, we actually discern different truths." Small t's, right? But all of them are correct. So if we were to argue with each other, we would all be wrong. But if we were to be willing to be open minded, consult and learn from each other, then our collective understanding would have been enhanced. What I find fascinating is that this principle of consultation is itself an application of the principle of justice. Because you're getting a diversity of views into the mix here. By incorporating and inviting diversity in, you are actually applying the principle of fairness, of equity, and of justice. The third tool that I would recommend we use in honing this quality of independent investigation of truth is the tool of intuition. Learning to listen and look for signs and confirmation is key in life. It's a tool that we each have, but some of us have honed it more and some have honed it less. You know how sometimes you go through life and you have a hunch. Something pops into your head and you think, "Gosh, I don't know where this came from." It's usually not when we're analyzing something or thinking about it, but it's just a thought that pops into our head, or guidance that just seems to come to us and we're not really sure where from. I don't know if you've had this experience. I know I've had it very often. There have been times I haven't trusted that inner guidance, that intuition, and I paid for it. From the ridiculous example of not taking the umbrella when something tells me, There are no clouds in the sky and there's no rain forecast, but take your umbrella," and I failed to do it and the rain has come. To far more important things that have a huge impact on our lives. The main thing with intuition is that our antenna, our internal antenna, if you like, have to be facing in the right direction to pick up on the messages. I guess a good analogy is radio and different radio waves. You have to tune the radio to pick up the messages that are coming through on the waves. If the music is on 94. 7 and you are tuned to 103. 5, you're not going to get the music that you want to get. So tuning ourselves and tuning our antenna is absolutely critical. The fourth tool is that of seeking divine assistance through prayer. Now, for those of you who don't believe in a higher power and don't believe in prayer, that's fine. For those of you who do, some people find it an incredibly powerful tool in which we basically open a channel to a divine consciousness and say, "Hey, look. I recognize that I'm not in full control of life and that there's a lot more out there than I am aware of. Please send me guidance or send me assistance. Please help remove the obstacles or provide opportunities or send me confirmations." This tool and the tool of intuition are different, but work together. We all are incredibly intuitive, whether or not you believe in a divine creator or not. But if you do pray, you are also tapping into an additional source of help. You will find that sometimes difficulties in life can be removed with the power of prayer, which is different from then receiving guidance about what you can do and steps that you can take. The two go hand in hand. These four tools, if used in conjunction with each other, because they're four tools that all human beings have been given, give us the best possible outcome. We take a basically a holographic or a holistic approach to life. And if we rely on using all four tools, then we are more likely to discern things accurately in ways that serve us. A way of thinking about this is if you want to have optimal health, there are different things to do. So some people focus on diet and on what they put into their bodies and eat. Others tend to focus on exercise. Others will focus on ensuring they get good sleep. Others focus on reducing stress and being present by doing mindfulness practice or meditation. But if we do all four of these things together, then the body is likely to be even healthier than it was before. Okay. There is another segment that I'm going to leave for next Saturday. There's four other factors that we need to take into account and need to practice if we are ultimately to hone the skill of investigating truth and sifting through and discerning what's true and what's false. And each of those four is really important. So I hope that you will tune in again next Saturday so we can continue this conversation. But in the meantime, thank you I'm going to look at your comments. and see what you have to say. Thank you, Shahrzad, for your very kind comment and Barzan. Ah, yes, Shirley Jones, the thing to do is to question the validity and source of our knowledge. I'm assuming that yes this has to do on all fronts, knowledge, whether you're looking at knowledge that you get through the media or through political leaders or ideologies, absolutely one of the skills we all need to hone is that of investigating what are these sources, what are people's motivations, questions. Are they thinking about the collective interest of all of us, or are they out for their own personal interest? Are they seeking money, status? Are they seeking recognition? Are they seeking influence? Is it all about them and their advancement in this world, or are they truly servants of humanity and there to make sure that we all benefit? And the same is true also if you're thinking about intuition, being able to discern the difference between guidance that is true inner guidance, from idle thoughts, idle fancies and vain imaginings, right? And there is one very good tip on this front of what's the difference between discerning intuition from other thoughts that may be floating through my head, of which there are thousands every day. Usually the voice of intuition is very uplifting. It is always positive. It always gives us solutions to problems, and the solutions don't feel like burdens. They feel, like it's a relief and uplifting. Other thoughts that are not intuition can often be very dense, can make us feel heavy, make things feel like they're chores. Very often our other thoughts are very negative and involve negative emotions like anger or resentment or blame or suspicion or depression or anxiety or fear. Intuition is always love based and the stuff that we don't want around is love often fear based. So those are two ways that I have found very helpful in my life to discern between those two. So thank you, Shirley. Very astute observation. If there are no more comments and I don't see any more, I will bid you all goodbye for now. Next time, we're going to continue this topic. So please tune in because the next four items are actually really important and very practical tips. Okay, take care. Bye bye for now. Have a great week. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.