This is a hard post to write because the tone will come across as someone who is immune to what I’m writing about, which I’m not.

I mean, I’m the person who put a styrofoam container of chicken wings in the oven to warm up for guests at a party and spent his entire life wearing my pants around my hips thinking that was my waist. And while I can laugh at those blunders, chalking them up to being nothing more than a doofus, I’ve also been taken in by dangerous presentations of information.

Why dangerous?

They were wrapped up in a way that seemed convincing enough for my personal bias at the time, leading me to believe things that just weren’t true (or a very massacred version of the truth).

However, my training in theology and philosophy has given me enough grounding to reconsider and critically think about the issues. It also helps that I’m a huge fan of Harlan Ellison who says it in a more direct way that his bar for bullshit is incredibly low.

And this is what is concerning me today is whether people even have a bar for bullshit?

While my generation and older want to blast the younger generation for a multitude of sins, I have to say they are doing much better at sifting through the cacophony of noise. I hear them in my classes laughing at the news stories and especially the groups of people who are apt to believe whatever a social media feed tells them.

Take, for instance, the idea of fifteen minute cities. The basic argument is every person should live no more than a fifteen minute walk or bike away from all their necessities (groceries, health care, restaurants, community centres, libraries, etc.). In other words, move away from dense residential development and build self-sustaining communities.

I currently live in one and it’s wonderful. As a result of the pandemic lockdowns, a lot of money went into our local economy allowing even more businesses to pop up nearby.

Yet, you have people convinced that fifteen minute cities means a complete lockdown of areas where people won’t be allowed to leave unless they have government permission.

Let me be blunt—have you tried using your brain on that conspiracy theory?

Police departments are already underfunded, making it difficult to respond to crime already in place, and you think that somehow they’re going to BARRICADE areas at all times? We’re already having difficulty keeping national borders in check, yet we’re somehow going to get enough people to surround communities.

And yet, the cognitive dissonance is so strong that a presentation of common sense will cause a person to venture into even more insane ideas.

So what’s happening here?

Why is this occurring?

Why are people failing to take the minimum number of steps to confirm whether what they’re being told has any grounding in reality?

There’s no simple answer and any attempt to reduce it to one is ignoring the complexity of our society today.

For starters, let’s take a look at our media. I used to love reading my local newspaper, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Globe and Mail and even dip into the Wall Street Journal. Not anymore.

Media has become such a commodified resource that private interests are only concerned with profit at the expense of anything like ethics, or even truth. Entertainment, sensationalism and speculation take priority over actual journalism.

Sure, media sources always had a bias to them and could easily be manipulated by power players in society using them as an outlet for propaganda (Ryan Holiday wrote a book about this very topic and Robert Moses was a master of it) – but as Mark Twain once said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”

Well, it feels as though consuming media today makes you both mis and uninformed. I may look at headlines a few times a week (my current service I enjoy is 1440 that does its best to deliver a variety of neutral stories, but still not perfect), but I’ve stopped consuming and feel I’m better off for it.

Another point is to be critical of my own bias.

My worldview was first shaped by my parents (politically liberal with very traditional conservative values), before going very conservative, then very liberal and now somewhere in-between. It always hurts to admit when I’m wrong, but I’d rather walk a more honest path than live a lie and having others keep me concealed within it.

A lot of that, of course, is also influenced by age and environment. So I have to be critical of those two as well—not to mention the political terms above have changed significantly over the past thirty years.

Maybe there is a conspiracy theory to purposefully keep the population woefully lacking in critical thinking skills while simultaneously bombarding them with distractions. I mean, that’s exactly what happened in the Roman Empire before it fell. Or maybe we’re just doing this to ourselves.

We lack the training needed to understand that what we read on the Internet is not information, but rather data; and data needs to be interpreted correctly. We also lack the training to avoid being swayed by social influence and charismatic figures.

Philosophical training in thinking may help, as would a resurgence of some vestige of a classical education.

But perhaps what we really need is a renaissance of celebrating the enlightenment ideals of rational thought, harking back to a time when an explosion of literacy emboldened a population to not accept the narrative they’ve been fed for generations. In the intermediary, I’m concerned.

I always have a naive hope for humanity and the people in it. It may be misguided and it may wrong, but I still have it. For right now, all I hope is that in the future, my current concern will be of no consequence.