Episode 17: THE INDEPENDENT AND UNBIASED INVESTIGATION OF TRUTH: useful tools

This episode is a sequel of preceding episode 16. Here we explore we consider several tools at our disposal to help us hone the skill of the independent and unbiased investigation of truth. 

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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. This episode is a sequel to the preceding episode 16. Here, we consider several tools at our disposal to help us hone the skill of the independent and unbiased investigation of truth. Last time we started talking about a really important topic, identifying an old, very dysfunctional habit that we have, the habit of essentially abdicating responsibility to discern truth for ourselves, and instead swallowing wholesale information that is fed to us regardless of the reliability of the source. We went on to explain what the impact of this old habit was, the need for us to take responsibility for having had this old habit, acknowledge it, embrace the responsibility, and then choose to move on, having recognized that we are now collectively approaching the stage of our maturity, and so we need to develop new habits and a new way of thinking about things that actually fit this current stage in our developmental process as a collective humanity. We said that as we approach this stage of maturity, we have to be accorded and we need to demand that we be accorded the respect of being allowed to understand the truth for ourselves without intermediaries, whether it's in the area of religion, with clergy, or talking heads on television or on the media who drown us in their opinions as though they were Truth with a capital T. We then talked about some tools that are at our disposal. I'm not going to repeat them. For those of you who missed last session, I highly recommend that you go back and view that video. There were four tools. And we said that today we were going to discuss five other factors that we need to be aware of and we need to either do or avoid doing certain things. What are they? The first is this. If we're truly going to hone the skill of investigating truth for ourselves without preconceptions and biases, we need to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone. We need to step out of the spheres of influence and information that we're really all comfortable with. We hear a lot about this, but it's true. We all are part of various echo chambers and communities where the perspectives that we have are amplified and repeated back to us and basically confirm whatever biases we already have in the first place. It's really time now that we step out of these comfort zones and actively seek to understand others whose opinions and truths with a small t differ from ours. We need to be curious about what their opinions are and to really try to understand their fears, their concerns, their hopes, and their aspirations. Humanity is facing some really critical problems that are rending apart our social fabric. If you just think about the country in which I live, which is the United States, and I know this is true for many other parts of the world, two very challenging issues that face humanity, face us in this country are, first of all, the tremendous political polarization that we've seen, especially over the last several years. It's been building over time, and it's now basically reached its pitch. Both sides are entrenched in their positions, and neither side is willing to budge, and each side essentially judges negatively the views and the opinions of the other side. If we want to heal this deep political rift between us, we need to step outside our comfort zone. That's one of the problems that we can address effectively using this new habit that we've been talking about. The second problem is endemic racism, structural racism that is a true scourge in our community and again has been corroding the social fabric of this society, as it has in other parts of the world. In order to tackle these very difficult social issues, we can start by taking some really simple steps. I'm a big believer in taking small, practicable, simple steps. The first thing that we can do is start actively identifying and reaching out to somebody who is on the other side of us in terms of their opinions and their perceptions and inviting them into our homes or into our homes, into our kitchens, to sit and have heart to heart conversations. That is step one. In pandemic times, if you cannot invite people into your homes, then we can do this over Zoom. Have a Zoom invitation. And then once we sit down to have the conversations, a question that I really like to lead off with, that I've generally found very effective, is to ask the other person, what keeps you up at night? That's where you want to start because there are things that are bugging everybody, things that are of deep concern to them. There are fears that motivate our beliefs and actions. And if we can start to identify what those fears and concerns are as a first step, then we can start to build bridges of understanding, followed by bridges of action. The third thing is when we ask this question, the spirit in which we ask it has to be one of authentic curiosity and caring, a real desire to connect our heart with the heart of another human being. In other words, we have to dispense with judgment, which we all have in spades. It's very hard to come into these conversations without judgment, because we're so accustomed to having our own view and being attached to it. But if we can put aside our judgments, albeit for a brief period of time, suspend our judgments and truly listen heart to heart, make those connections and see what the other person has to offer, see if we can broaden our own understanding and perspective. We don't have to come up with solutions. We just need to open our ears and listen. So that's the fourth thing, to truly be able to listen without immediately jumping in with views or arguments or opposing views, which is what we normally do. I believe that if we start with these small four first steps, and each of us can do this as an individual, we will start slowly to build bridges of understanding, and over time, and it will take time because this is a process, we will be able to heal and mend these rifts and get rid of the effects of the corrosions. Okay, that was factor number one. That was basically something we can do. The second factor is detaching ourselves from strong emotions, whether positive or negative. Here's the truth, folks. To dispassionately assess the truth, we have to practice detaching ourselves from our predisposition to like or dislike a person or their views. Why is that? Because, I don't know if you've noticed, but we tend to be particularly susceptible to prejudices when we're emotionally influenced positively or negatively. When we're strongly attached to a person we really like or a group of people and feel emotionally connected to them and what they represent to us. We often follow them without critically examining their character or what they're saying. Similarly, we're inclined to judge harshly when we strongly dislike or even hate an idea, a person, or a group of people. We feel repelled by them. We see this factor at play at all levels of human interaction. I know in talking to a lot of students, very often their approach to a class, whether it's in high school or university is, "Oh, do I like this professor or not? Does the professor seem to like me?" And on the basis of how I feel about the professor or how I think they feel about me, then I will work hard for them or I will just blow off the course. This is a human tendency to start off with emotions. Do I like this person? Do I like this group or not? We also see this at the racial and ethnic level. I see this a lot with ethnic communities. I'm from Persian background and I find that Persians, like all other groups, tend to stick together. If a Persian is accused of doing something wrong, the initial tendency, especially when you're outside your own country, is to jump to their defense and assume that because they are of the same background as you, same nationality, that they're basically good people and we can trust them and they couldn't possibly have done any wrong. The same happens across racial groups and it happens across nations and it happens in international relations. For instance, let's take the concept of nuclear proliferation. There are a whole bunch of countries in the world that have intentionally flouted and broken the rules of international law with respect to the creation of illegal nuclear weapons programs. However, the international community's response and various countries' responses to these different nations have been very different, even though the breaches, the behavior has been the same bad behavior, the same illegal behavior. The tendency is if we like the country and we generally have good relations with them and we trust them, then we're likely to want to give them a pass, or maybe give them a slap on the wrist. But if we don't trust a country and we actively dislike it and they're very different from us in many different respects, then we really want to punish them very harshly with sanctions and all other kinds of punishments. There's a level of unfairness that automatically kicks in, because the reactions and responses and punishments to the same breaches are different depending on who the offending party is. Once we're aware of these predispositions, based on emotional biases, essentially, that we have, as soon as we're aware that this is a factor, then we can start paying attention, and we can start to question ourselves and start to stand back from ourselves and observe ourselves when we enter into interactions with people say, "Ah, isn't that interesting? I noticed I've got this gut reaction to what this person is saying or doing. Why is that? What preconceived like or dislike do I have? And what is that based on? Usually on ignorance and inaccurate information, which is precisely why we're having this conversation. All right, factor number three that we need to pay attention to is to ensure that we focus on empirical information rather than opinion. It actually requires a lot of vigilance and discipline to sift fact from opinion, and it's particularly difficult in today's world where we're so immersed in a media culture that is dominated by gossip that seeks to build up and tear down individuals and systems and parties and groups and nationalities through hearsay and idle chatter. What we really need to start insist that our media changes its culture. Enough of the talking heads who tell us not only smidgens of a fact, but really most of what they deliver to us these days is opinion. And why should one person or two people's opinion matter more than my own? Why should I lose touch with my own ability to assess information based on just facts, which should be a reflection of what is going on in society, and then assess for myself? This whole culture of gossip and talking heads needs to go by the wayside. But again, it's got to start with us, because until we develop as a whole bunch of individuals, we cultivate this habit within us and these behaviors really become habits that then become culture. It won't be until that happens that we can then change the media because there's got to be enough demand amongst the population for this kind of change, otherwise it's not going to happen. So you and I have a responsibility to create this change within ourselves and really just start monitoring ourselves. If enough of us do that, slowly over time the culture of our society will change and then we can start making demands that the media change. And they will because they'll recognize that what people seek is no longer the rumor and idle chatter and gossip and just random opinions. Factor number four is a really interesting concept. It's a prevalent trend that was identified by a professor at Yale called Timothy Snyder, and he calls this generic cynicism. He says that this is a trend that is now prevalent, in which we question the very existence of truth. And he says, quote, "It makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference." And he says, we basically end up hiding behind this new wave, it's a new kind of cynicism that then frees us from foraging for the truth and discerning fact from fiction, and we lull ourselves into justified inaction: "What's the point in trying to investigate truth? What is truth anyway, right? It doesn't really exist." And that then gives us amazing excuse not to even try to do the hard work of sifting. We really need to resist this temptation towards this kind of sense of apathetic resignation: "Oh what's the point?" Remember, this is something we've been talking about in these sessions that we sometimes adopt this victim mentality: "Oh, whatever I do is useless, everything's futile, so why bother doing anything?" This is exactly the sort of thing that he has picked up on as well and is talking about. So we have to seek the truth no matter how challenging and how much stuff we have to wade through in order to get to the facts and to the truth and sift it out from the opinions. The fifth and last of the factors that I wanted to share with you is the importance of avoiding a pitfall that many of us fall into. The pitfall that says that truth lies in the middle of opposing views and that it therefore requires compromise. You just figure out what the two opposing views are and you take a Solomonic approach in some sense and you cut the baby in half and voila, there you have your truth. This approach has caused untold damage. Let's just look at the arena of climate change. For years, we wasted time in these futile debates about whether climate change was true, was it a reality, and did it result from human activity or was it just something that happens naturally in the world? I attribute a lot of this waste of precious time, and therefore the exacerbation of global warming and climate change, at the foot against the media, the feet of the media. Why? Because what they did on endless panels that I watched and observed is that they would allocate 50 percent time to climate scientists who told us, 97 percent of them, that climate change is real and it is caused by human activity, and then they allocated another 50 percent time on the panels to the 3 percent who were naysayers and had their own ideologies and political agendas for denying climate change. And so they confused the population, because the population would sit and listen to these panels and say 50 percent say this and 50 percent say that, which was not true at all. Although 50 percent time was allocated to the two opposing points of view, the reality was that by far the majority, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists were always very clear that climate change was real and that it was caused by our activity and that we then needed to take action in order to mitigate the effects of climate change. The damage that's been done and the damage that we're seeing to the world with climate change, with the floods and the cyclones and the extremes of heat and cold and droughts and famines and wildfires in Australia and in the west coast of the U. S. and in the Amazon and in the Congo and all of the impacts that I'm not going to go into, we could probably have ameliorated a whole bunch of these things, had we had the ability to discern fact from fiction, fact from opinion, and had we honed the skill of the independent and unbiased investigation of truth. In sum, honing this skill is absolutely critical. I view it as a form of immunization. Just as we take the COVID vaccine to immunize ourselves against serious illness and hospitalization, and hopefully against even catching it, so too we have to learn to immunize ourselves as societies against rumor, gossip, and opinions that are just not based in fact, and to be able to sift reliable sources from unreliable sources of information. To the extent we're able to do this, we immunize ourselves against being susceptible to the manipulation of interests that seek to serve their own agendas by sowing doubts in our minds, by creating suspicion, and by ultimately sowing confusion that makes us turn against each other. Indeed our well being and and ability to thrive as nations and as a human race will depend on the speed with which we develop this habit. So this is really the clarion call to each of us to go out and, starting this very second, start to exercise this muscle of independent investigation of truth. It is going to need time to develop. When you go to the gym, you don't come out saying, "Okay. I lifted weights. Oh, geez, it doesn't work. My muscles haven't been built." It doesn't happen the second day or the third day or first week or the second week. It usually takes several weeks and usually two or three months before you start to really see results. Like everything else in life, it's a process and we have to take on the mantle of leadership. The true definition of leadership that we explored in one of our sessions is somebody who's able to influence the beliefs of the community. The thoughts and behaviors of another. Leadership starts with ourselves. We have the ability to influence our own beliefs, our own thoughts, and our own actions. So let's embrace this responsibility and start taking steps today to make the changes that demonstrate true leadership and to create a new culture that will bode well for all of us. All right. Those are my comments for today. I don't see any comments, which is fine. If you like the kinds of materials that we're covering, including what we just covered today and the last two sessions, please consider picking up a copy of the Alchemy of Peace: Six Essential Shifts and Mindsets and Habits to Achieve World Peace. It's available worldwide on amazon. com. All right I will bid you goodbye for now Take care. Bye bye. 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.