The Age of Misinformation, Deception and Manipulation

When there is freedom and opportunity, the range of actual experiences and actualizations will vary greatly, manifesting everything every individual brings into that situation. So naturally, some will be much better off while some will be much worse, but on average, the general experience will be much higher in the progression of time. That is what it invariably will be -- as the process of natural selection -- which is the test of time, and not simply the current hysteria and mania which can be more easily manipulated.

The problem is the tendency to magnify only the experiences of a few as though it was the greater truth of that experience -- and thus give the impression of what is not true. In another era, that was usually the ploys of “Madison Avenue” types -- who believed that anything they could get away with and fool their fellow citizens with, was fair game -- for which they were rewarded quite handsomely with status and income. That "success" caused many others to take up such tactics to achieve their own devious successes.

Many however, destroyed their own personal integrity to the extent that they became a cliché of those individuals whose personal health and lives suffered -- because very few could maintain a vastly separate and different life. That is the disintegrating experience of the fragmented life -- in which nothing has relationship to any other reality and validating experience in life. The truth for those, is simply what they can get anybody else to believe.

Unfortunately many people get that experience of education rather than in systematic inquiries of uncertainties -- finding out when they don’t know. For the former, it is enough just to be told what to think (and reinforced), rather than learning how to think for themselves, and not require some authority, like the “information specialist,” professors, and editorialists to tell them what to think, while also making them think they came up with those biases and prejudices quite on their own scientific methods and merits.

So while it is enlightening to be aware of other people’s opinions and thoughts, what is even more important is to recognize when those notions are ignorance promoted as “conventional wisdom” that every “progressive” and “liberal-minded” person should pride themselves on holding.

It’s not a partisan issue as much as it is the danger of this incomplete picture that undermines life and experience in every actuality. One disastrously mistakes the tiny part from the greater truth of the whole -- which is the whole truth, and not to know and experience that, is to experience utter confusion and chaos all the days of one’s life, and not to be aware of even that.