Forgive the clickbaity title, but sometimes I'm amazed by the stuff that shows up in my email.
Just this morning, a “Facebook friend” was ranting on and on about the evils of UN's ”Agenda 2030” and how it would kill off most of Earth's population. It's the second time in a couple of days that name has crossed my desk.
Instead of entering another annoying debate, I simply asked aforesaid friend whether they had actually read the ”Agenda 2030” documents, themselves. As is usually the case, the answer was no and their outrage was based largely on an opinion they’d read on some tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist’s website… which led them to feel OUTRAGED!
Once again, I didn't engage but merely suggested that they go read the actual ”Agenda 2030 document” which is available in multiple places online as a free PDF download. In other words, why not form your own opinion, rather than merely regurgitating somebody else’s outrage?
It all reminded me a bit of this web forum I belonged to many years ago, which was created by this Dutch fellow whose entire obsession in life was the planetary pole shift and coming to the end of the world. I'd subscribed to his group because I had actually met him in person at a meetup, but unsubscribed soon enough once it became painfully evident that every single thing he ever said was filtered through the lens of prescription that the poles were going to shift and the world was going to come to an end due to horrible devastation.
I just got a little bit tired of the daily stream of ”updates” along the lines of ”Warehouse in Hong Kong burns! Evidence of the end of the world!” The next day it would be ”Heavy rains in Bangladesh! The pole shift is at hand!” It didn't take me very long to grow exhausted by the endless stream of non-causal correlations being peddled as absolute truth.
The ”Agenda 2030” bit was actually just the catalyst for my sitting down and trying to write this post. The precursor was a blog post I read about government corruption.
As I was reading that post — talking about how we couldn't trust anybody in government because they are so corrupt — it occurred to me that the writer’s lens of perception was formed around their particular reality of being an ex-pat now living in a nation — The Philippines — that ranked quite low on the Global Corruptions Perceptions Index.
It was a poignant reminder that we tend to shape our opinions around our body of experience and what exists within our visible spectrum of perception.
There was also a poignant reminder to myself that my own opinions tend to be based around the fact that I was born in and grew up in Denmark — which is the highest ranked nation in the world in terms of people trusting in government — and to stay mindful not to project my experience on a personal level as some kind of global truth.
I grew up with a paradigm under which things were — in FACT — typically not corrupt. Therefore, I do not ”assume corruption.” Similarly, a person who grew up in a highly corrupt environment would find it almost inconceivable that a trustworthy governmental body could exist. Within our respective frames of reference, neither of us are — technically speaking — ”wrong.”
Our backgrounds and bodies of experience have a huge impact and how we approach and perceive anything we encounter in life.
Take something like the UN's ”Agenda 2030.”
If you read the original document, do you approach doing so with the intent of finding something good and worthwhile or something evil and nefarious? When an event happens in your life — to get a little more “local” with it — do you look to interpret it through lens of negativity, positivity or simply neutrality?
Personally speaking, I try to avoid the ”Universal Crazy Train” by going to the source — to whatever extent that's possible — rather than depend and other people's praise, outrage, suspicion, encouragement or even Internet memes... in order to draw my own conclusions.
I recognize that most people don't approach life like that. And I also recognize that most of us have our own personal agendas. Mine is... well... that I was the most gullible kid and teenager around, probably for the nearest 100 miles. So my "agenda" is to not be taken in by anything that is easily disproved as a fool's errand through a little rigorous research of my own.
Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!
How about YOU? How rigorously do you "source" information for trustworthiness? Do you tend to have a positive, or negative, information bias? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20210429 02:02 PDT
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