It has long been known that the truth is easy to tell but a lie requires much better packaging. There is also the old adage about fooling people. Sadly I think the real truth is who you can and who you cannot fool. For this I need to come back to another truism, the person in the world that is easiest to lie to is yourself. I asked someone this once and they replied it was them, not self. An easy confusion and a pathetic statement. if you think about an examination of truth and open with the easiest person to lie to being ourselves then the logical extension is that since trust must start within it is impossible to rationally arrive at any truth.
This reminds me of the great comedy line “everything you know is wrong” which of course is a delicious paradox because if you know this to be true and at once wrong it cannot be. Delightful as this comedic line is I ask you to instead start with the honest concession that if self is the easiest person to lie to then anything you believe could potentially be based on a deception. Now let us examine why our self is the easiest to delude. Would you ever knowingly do harm to yourself? Of course not. It was this calm confidence that led me as a three year old to try sticking a penny into a wall socket under construction. Needless to say my mother was distressed but my father pointed out I would not be repeating that shocking experience. Good point.
The reason we can so easily delude ourselves is that we operate on the belief that the ideas that pop into our heads are trustworthy. In every venture I have ever done I have had people approach me with lots of “great” ideas. What is to me astonishing is the invariable truths I know about their ideas. Invariably no matter how obvious they act as if their moment of introspection is a revelation that my years of deep involvement would not have considered. They also have given no consideration to the difficulty or effort of applying the idea. Finally they fail to realize that it is almost certain I evaluated this idea and many others in my years of application they are not privy to. Why do I point this out? Because people not only trust their ideas, they seem universally to have a complete lack of comprehension what it takes to see an idea through to completion. Thus the fact that most projects are never finished and most people are much more comfortable with a boss to promise them a paycheck than to really compete for their money… not that there is anything wrong with that. It’s just an insulation from one of the most interesting experiences to shape our lives.
Getting back to our problem of self trust, information begins to flow into our mind at a young age in a very disorderly format. As a boy of 14 I began pondering this and how it affected my inconsistencies and inability to parse information. I began a several month mental reorganization effort that shaped my life. it was by no means an inoculation from irrational ideas or self deception but I like to think it helped me to honestly recognize my own irrationality and correct it. We develop beliefs and ideas in our lives at different times and reference those value judgments through our lives, but sometimes our values change. Sometimes we need to rethink and clean house.
This is my little routine. This is how I clean house and keep it clean. I believe that most of what we do is by rote, which is to say it is remembered action, like walking or driving a car. A smaller percentage of what we do is by reason, like solving problems. Each has it’s benefits and if our brains lack one we are rendered incapable of functioning normally. What I do is realize that rote is faster and more consistent, but distrust it nonetheless. I try to do two things. First I try to rebuild my rote behavior with reason and second I look to randomly question what I’m doing to see if my rote behavior is serving my rational ends.
I have a hierarchy of trust. I trust most ideas that have been demonstrated and proven. I offer more trust to information sources that prove to be true. I offer the least trust to unknown and unproven sources. My simple filter is prove it. I inherently distrust information. Now some people say “why would this person lie to me?” and I say “That’s a good question, why do you think?” It’s important to realize that I’m not saying that everyone who may appear to have a motive to lie is lying. I’m saying I’d like to have a look at that motive.
Now if someone tells me we are killing the planet and someone disagrees the argument today is that the person who doesn’t believe in global warming must be in the pocket of the oil companies. Okay, prove it. But while we’re at it I have a question. How is it that only one side here has a financial motive? Mr Gore might you have a motive? A billion dollars in carbon credits certainly looks enticing to me. Could you be absolutely impartial if you were playing for a billion dollars? As it happens I have an opinion because I have researched this and I know there is a hell of a lot more money in the Enron carbon trading scheme. However the interesting thing is asking the question what carbon trading will accomplish. It seems it will end up having little effect on carbon and if it did it wouldn’t matter because China isn’t playing and is building two coal plants a week. It will however move a lot of money from our pockets to the pockets of people like Al Gore and Goldman Sachs who used their AIG payback to buy 10% of the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Now if I just lost you here because you believe that every time you sneeze the CO2 kills a polar bear then I remind you to ask yourself the question… “what if I’m wrong?” Why do I believe what I believe? What information source has proven trustworthy. When Ronald Reagan was elected I was getting my information from Saturday Night Live and I was upset. I hated seeing smug guys in suits celebrating. A few years later I dealt with the simple fact. I had seen the economy turn around Reagan was right. Thus began my transformation. Today he is condemned for signing congressional budgets into law that, even though his tax cuts doubled tax revenue in a decade and created the largest single economic boom in history, led to deficits. Ask yourself the difference between making money and spending money and if you can be solvent from only one of the two.
I saw Glenn Beck’s speech at CPAC today and I think he is an interesting guy. I don’t agree with everything he says but I have seen that he does an amazing amount of reading and has a huge research department. As much as he is hated on the left I think if he was saying stupid and untrue things there would be a field day. Beck pointed out he started college but could not afford to continue. He was self educated and proud of it. I have often been told that I seem well educated, but like our founders who I think are brilliant and I am not worthy to compare to I am like Beck. I took my education as my own responsibility. What has been amazing to me is what I have learned since I left school.
Most Americans agree the revolutionary war and the civil war are the among the most exceptional stories of our history, but what do they know about it. Do they know more men died freezing to death in Valley forge than in battle? Do they know that most of the signers of the declaration of independence lost their fortunes or their lives during the war? Do they know that in both wars you could follow the marches by looking for the blood in the road from those who could not afford boots? Do they know that shortly before re-election Abraham Lincoln was not only looking like he would lose but he was opposed by all of congress, his cabinet and his wife? When asked if he should declare marshal law he declined as he saw it as great a violation of his oath to the constitution as the South’s succession? Amazingly after Katrina the second amendment was suspended.
I think perhaps the greatest tragedy today in America is a lessor version of China’s cultural revolution. Remember that? Probably not. Look it up. Essentially Mao wanted to break ties with the past and look forward. At least that is what he said. However destroying all they could of their history, writings and grand tradition was for the simple purpose that it is easier to transform and oppress a people who have lost their identity than one who has a tradition to protect. Today we call it revisionism. In America it is everywhere. Schools wanting history to only go back to the late 1800s. Rock and roll artists wearing the image of the cold blooded murderer Che Guevera who outlawed rock and roll. White house staffers extolling their admiration for Mao tse Tung who killed 70,000,000 of his own people.
What president signed the sedition act which outlawed public speech against government policies? What president introduced the federal reserve bank and gave us the 16th amendment and the progressive income tax? What president gave us prohibition? The answer to all the above is Wudrow Wilson who ran for re-election promising to keep us out of war and promptly put us there. He also laid the groundwork for the UN and for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his progressive movement was upset in the 1930s that Germany was ahead of the US in eugenics… ideas that were far less popular after the Nazis took this American idea and created the holocaust with it.
Navigating the truth is much more difficult when we fail to know the essential point of reference that is history. Those people who could make good have traditionally prospered in business in America. Those who could not appear to have contrived to prosper in the ivory towers of education with their tenure protecting them from any form of competition and the halls of government. By government I don’t mean elected officials, I mean the public employee unions that already get 30%-40% more than comparable private sector jobs and 90% salary pensions after 30 years.
Am I rambling? Perhaps. It’s just that truth is of little use if there is no freedom to benefit from it. A wise prisoner is still a prisoner, and this is why it is important to ask if the glossy pamphlet of a wonderful life before you is actually a gilded cage. Now is a very good time to start asking questions instead of simply taking on the 30 second sound bite jingoistic claims of some politician. In fact if there is anyone I would say has the highest bar before I will give them any trust it is anyone in politics. They are not all liars, the convenient ideologues response when it is clear their guy is lying, but I operate on the assumption that until they can point to evidence I can believe they are assumed to be lying.
Here are some questions I don’t think we ask enough. Why does the government need to borrow so much money and how do they see our financial standing after perpetually going backward $10T a decade? Why are government jobs paying almost half again what private sector jobs are and getting getting huge raises and lavish pensions? Why do government employees need labor unions to negotiate with governments that don’t make a profit or handle our money responsibly? Why is the answer to every problem throwing more money at it and more government programs? How many times can we raise taxes before we just give up and send our entire income in and live off the government programs?
I think this is the most difficult idea for so many people. Why would this or that politician or media figure lie to me? Good question. I think asking a good question without looking for a good answer is a good way to end up asking why you believed a pack of lies after you have suffered the consequences. I saw a recent poll that showed 35% of the population admitted they voted for Obama. What happened to the other 20% and why would they lie about that?