When I started writing as a passionate hobby, things were very different. My continued pursuit of knowledge, college degrees, and work experience was enough to add a level of acceptance to my written opinions. I had paid my proverbial dues.
If I had then quoted a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, National Academy of Sciences fellow and Harvard University professor, like Steven Pinker from his book “Rationality,” that would have been a credibility insurance policy. which would have resulted in additional gains. the approval of my readers. But things have changed.
When I was teaching and lecturing, I often asked students or business people I was talking to what color my tie was.
Although there were sometimes minimal nuanced suggestions as to the hue, it was generally accepted that if it was blue, the tie was blue. That’s when I would suggest that the only reason we called it blue was because we had agreed as a civilization that the name of that shade was, in fact, blue. It was a universally accepted decision. Now even things like the color blue are in question.
As Pinker states, “We have tended to use the powerful reasoning tools we have discovered over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation, and causation, as optimal means to uncover beliefs and engage in choices individually and with others. »
This tie is blue.
Then the lid lifted and a significant percentage of us began to cling to errors, biases and illusions as sources of information. Even though our world has worked because “we have discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and established the benchmarks of rationality itself”, this alternative belief system has prevailed.
That’s when professional liars and scammers started to play deeply on our biases, weaknesses and delusions and touched nerves that for many made sense. Their lies were surrounded by just enough truth, and that truth seemed so real that the rationality disappeared.
In a recent SNL monologue, Dave Chappelle alluded to the debate in which the future 45th president said right away that the game was settled, and that he hadn’t paid taxes, hadn’t complied the rules and hadn’t succumbed to normalcy because he didn’t have to.
As Chappelle described it, admitting this information by someone who had benefited so deeply from a rigged system was a truthful revelation that had never before been released on a presidential debate stage.
The then-contestant went on to say that “if you want everyone to play by the same rules, change them.” It resonated so deeply because no one in the billionaire class had made such outspoken statements on such issues in the past. Yes, our elected legislators had better pensions, better health insurance, and could invest in stocks they had inside information about.
Moreover, many of them had become wealthy through the same system that deprived working people of fair wages, opportunities to increase their wealth, and protection from lawsuits enjoyed by this protected class.
The education, FBI, CIA, and judiciary branches were all openly criticized, and it caused ah-ha moment after another with those who had been suspicious of them in the past. Yet none of these important skewed rules have changed, and the rich have gotten even richer.
The challenge for us as a society now is to try to find ways to start agreeing on the color blue again. We all know that the system is often distorted, but openly destroying it, denying it, or ignoring it will leave us all in a state of messy chaos. We have much to do to correct these flaws.
Immediately after the election, I received a text that said, “I’m done with politics…it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Just a sleight of hand while both sides screw us up. I advance.”
Let’s move forward together and work to fix what needs to be fixed.
Let’s agree on what’s really red, white and blue, and respect each other as we go back together.
Nick Jacobs of Windber is a healthcare consultant and author of the book “Taking the Hell Out of Healthcare”.
Nick Jacobs of Windber is a healthcare consultant and author of the book “Taking the Hell Out of Healthcare”.
#Nick #Jacobs #challenge #start