Trust

A post in which I ramble about trust, lies, and forgiveness.

Inspired by a post by Hanny, I have been pondering the topic of trust for the past day. While he writes about his personal issues with trust, the decline of trust in our society is what has dominated my thinking. There have been two eras in my life where trust has disintegrated within our society with the first being the Watergate fallout. The second is harder for me to figure out when it started and for good reason. I will get back to that in a bit.

It would be good for me to write a disclaimer of sorts.

A year and half ago, I went through a pain therapy course involving meditation to relieve chronic pain. In order to join the course, I had to take the multiphasic personality test that professionals belief reveal all about you. According to it, I trust too easily.

Anybody who knows me in any kind of depth knows I do not trust people one whit. My favorite mental phrase is “I don’t trust them any further than I can shoot them.” Seriously, I am not joking. When I was very young, I was trusting. It was interactions with other humans that completely destroyed that. Betrayal is something I learned about early and repeatedly.

An Era of No Trust or Too Much Trust?

I find myself pondering on how we live in an increasingly confusing time for most people. With trust in governments foundering world wide and growing here in the United States, uncertainty in the future is increasing the distrust of authorities. Well, that and their corrupt actions with Weiner being only the latest public figure to go down in flames. But on the other hand, there is still too much trust in the wildest of conspiracy theories and even more insidious to my thinking, the so called “experts” on any given subject.

The inability to sort fact from fiction has become something of a hallmark of our entertainment driven culture. Reality television is often very scripted (often at a pro wrestling level of sophistication) for one example. Hollywood has always distorted history in favor of drama and that has continued unabated in its junior sibling, television. 

Watching Citizen Kane and the accompanying documentary, talking to some friends about the new Area 51 book, and reading various stories in newspapers that spin facts into fiction has me thinking hard about people’s ability to discriminate what really is going on. I had hoped the worldwide Web would make it easier to find out the truth about things and it has to a very limited degree. With arm chair and accredited experts willing to make stories up out of whole cloth and/or lie to promote an agenda, there are far too many unsubstantiated “facts” available on the Internet. To counter this, it takes skill and an understanding of logic to sort out what is factual versus what is not. That’s a big problem.

Most people don’t make or have the time to dig deeply into a subject even if they knew how to. Human tendency is to leave work to others and then listen to an expert in the field. This is easier and far more convenient than jumping into trying to understand an unfamiliar subject. Add in the catastrophic failure that is our public education system that churns out illiterates from our high schools and colleges when we desperately need critical thinkers… Ugh.

Meanwhile, it is a big assumption to trust that an expert really does know what he is talking about in the first place. We have a lot of theoreticians espousing theories as proven facts or science all over the media. That’s how we get specious junk science such as anthropogenic global warming, mercury in vaccinations causing autism, and Keynesian financial stimulus packages. Note that all three have had proponents with a financial interest in their theory being accepted.

On a lesser, but still disturbing level are conspiracy theories that have gained considerably traction. Examples include Obama not being born in Hawaii, Trig Palin being Bristol’s child, the CIA being behind JFK’s assassination, AIDS being created by the US to wipe out Africans, and any number of chain emails that end up in your inbox. It seems like there is rarely a week that goes by that I don’t see some easily disproved thing in an email. But woe be unto you who try to counter with the truth!

The more dramatic the lie, the more easily it seems to be believed. And once that lie is believed, the harder it is to convince someone of the facts. I know a lot of good people who believe things that are completely untrue and get very upset when informed otherwise. Not upset at being deceived, but at me for challenging things. I admit that I’m burned out on trying to straighten things out and don’t try to as much as I once did.

So people are putting a lot of trust into untrustworthy things even as their trust of institutions dwindle. It makes me wonder if there is such a thing as a law of conservation of trust, where trust lost in one thing has to be transferred to another. We are choosing to trust in things we shouldn’t as a reaction to having our trust in institutions broken.

One thing is for certain, I’m seeing a lot of fear in people’s eyes these days and it really shows up when you start bringing up facts. It may simply be that people are running away from reality.  With a culture mired in perpetual adolescence, I really shouldn’t be surprised by this. So the moral of the story is that we need to be more skeptical and really devote attention to the things that matter. We have entered a time where running away may not be an option for much longer.

Climate Change Scandal Taints Science

I’ve avoided writing on the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit having their files “hacked” because it is hard to get worked up over the turning battle over man made global warming. The majority of people have now realized that this is bogus movement with the tipping point happening some time this year. Still, a significant percentage still believe in this junk science so the revelations of data tampering exposed by the documents has done quite a bit of damage.  Christopher Booker’s commentary at the Telegraph lays out why this is such an important scandal and I highly advise reading it.

This needed to be brought to the light like any politically driven pseudo science, but I fear there will be fallout across the board tainting the public perception of scientific research.  The old problem of a few rotten eggs ruining things is something I’ve worried about. An example of how science is now getting a negative reputation can be found in the hysteria that starting the CERN supercollider would create a black hole. The earth will be sucked into and we’ll all die!

Yes, people have little understanding of scientific method and I blame our pathetic public education system for that. The bad eggs in politicized junk science have aggravated the problem as they use sensationalism to obtain large grants.  Maybe it is time to seriously audit all research grants to see how the money is actually spent and see if there is graft going on. Of course, that would be negative publicity for scientific research again. *sigh*

We still have to get the truth and I hope this scandal will have a chilling effect on corrupt scientists.

The Truth about Iraq

Michael Yon Online

Michael Totten's Middle East Journal

Most of what you read, see, and hear in the media about Iraq is distorted or false. Only a very few reporters have been seeking the truth on the ground and these are the two best out there. Take a look around their reports and you will soon get a clearer picture of things. Sometime in the past months, a tipping point was reached and things changed in Iraq for the better. But you won't see that in the media because it interferes with "shaping the narrative", whether it be anti-Conservative/BDS on the left or isolationist on the far right of the political spectrum. The truth, like all things of God, respects no man.

The truth is out there and it is complicated, messy, and requires real thought to see and comprehend. We can rail against politicians, the media, and perceived conspiracies all we want, but the main blame for this ignorance has to rest on the shoulders of the masses. The American people don't want to put effort into finding out what is going on in the world or even their local area. They wish to be spoon fed, want somebody else to deal with the problems while they go about their busy and utterly inward focused lives.

This is the challenge of our time, bringing truth to those who don't have it and more frightening to me, those who don't want it. So please take the time to read the reports by these two gentlemen. You may read things you don't want to believe, may read things that reinforce your already held views, but you will be reading honest journalism, a rarity in this day.