I can only operate on what my senses have revealed to me and knowledge I can encounter. This is my truth. I cannot see your truth because I do not share your mind, your experiences, etc. My truth and your truth likely overlap in many places through shared experiences, shared knowledge, etc. With that said my truth is unique to me. The things that are not different are those things we call facts. In actuality that is one of the distinguishing traits between truth and fact. A fact is something immutable and consistent. Truth on the other hand can only be subjective. I can know no other truth than my own. You can share knowledge and challenge my truth and if I am receptive and listen you will never make my truth identical to yours. You will however make my truth change. One thing that is an aspect of this is known as learning.
If you pay attention as you are debating with someone that has a different perception of something than you it is possible you may notice some of the things I have become aware of. First. People have been conditioned to think being wrong is a bad thing. They seem to view it as failure on their part. For this reason they absolutely do not want to be wrong. Second. People will seek reasons to dismiss you and what you say. I call this seeking the mental escape hatch so they can then toss what you are saying into their mental spam filters. I wanted to train of thought write this post about these two things. To me they are important to be aware of and they seem to be quite prevalent in the global society of today.
Being Wrong Does Not Feel Good
People have been conditioned that being wrong is a bad thing. I've on more than one occasion encountered people who insist they are never, or rarely wrong. They wear this almost like it is some kind of badge of honor. I've also encountered a lot of people that don't say this yet their actions imply they think this. They tend to be those people who always can blame someone or something else. Things that go wrong for them in life are never their fault. There is always some other target on which to pin the blame. There is always one or more scapegoats that can take the blame. In some cases those targets may actually share part of the fault/blame. In other cases they may not be to blame at all. The key part was that this person could not be wrong. It could not be their fault.
Another manifestation of this is what we call Cognitive Dissonance where your mind will begin to spin and twist to avoid acknowledging something that challenges your truth. Instead of allowing your truth to breathe, grow, and change as new information is encountered you have armored your truth and you do not want it to change. Change can be frightening and if the world around us hasn't shown you... People seem to react in irrational ways to fear over almost any other emotion.
In reality being wrong is a good thing provided the thing you are wrong about isn't the same thing you've already been wrong about multiple times. Being wrong is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to learn. It is an opportunity for your truth to adapt and become closer to an overall (but unattainable) truth. The model of the world and reality will be more accurate than it was before. You first must acknowledge you were wrong and then learn. Your truth must not be rigid. It must not be fixed and absolute. It must adapt to new information. Sometimes that information can shatter the foundation upon which we have based many other things. This can be frightening and usually leads to something we refer to as a Paradigm Shift. This can truly suck for awhile and can be quite scary because it forces you to rethink many things and and ways you had of thinking about things. This can take some time and some serious effort and often people will fight doing this simply because they don't want to put in that effort. It is easier to embrace the cognitive dissonance that acts as your armor and pretend that information that revealed a flaw in your truth does not exist. You never saw it, you never heard it, and therefore it didn't happen. Whew!! Don't you feel better? You don't need to change anything you can keep talking as you always have. You can keep pushing your truth and mentally hope no one you choose to debate with ever points out that flaw or others again. You are right, you know it. Now you just need to make as many people as possible share your vision.
Stop and think for a minute about that. Your defenses engaged, and you didn't allow your truth to adapt. Yet you fully plan to debate with other people and keep pushing your flawed truth as though it has no flaw. You didn't adapt, change, and allow your truth to adjust to not have that flaw. That would take too much effort. Instead you continue to peddle the flawed truth to as many people as you can. That sounds like a mental virus carrier to me. I think you should stop doing it. What do you think?
The Ways and Means of Dismissal
This brings me to the second point. The seeking of mental escape hatches. This is a technique I notice many (I'd even hazard most) people do. They seek reasons to discount someone that is challenging their truth, or perhaps just some topic. Recall I've already addressed people not wanting to be wrong. It is good to put up a good defense. It is the ideas that survive the defense that can be important. However, what techniques do you use and do they actually allow for the truth? You see debates generally speaking do not have to be an ALL OR NOTHING type of exchange. You can be partially right, and partially wrong at the same time. It isn't a COMPLETELY WRONG or COMPLETELY RIGHT type of situation except in rare occasions. Those partially wrong areas are opportunities to learn and grow. They should be viewed as a good thing rather than a bad thing. They also are more of a VICTORY than a loss.
If you were wrong and learned something to me that sounds like a victory. What about the person who is never wrong and thus really never learns anything new? That sounds like a very sad state of being. I'd call that a loss.
With that said I've noticed a lot of very intelligent people seem to use what I'd call an escape hatch technique. They look for quick excuses to mentally discount what you are talking about. Sometimes they are not particularly intelligent people but they have been conditioned to seek out words and phrases that then can justify them engaging their mental spam filters. Perhaps for example you used their wrong pronoun. At that point they fixate on that and they either choose to ignore everything else you said or they are just so mentally enraged by your disrespect that they fail to pay attention to the rest while their mind is raging internally about how wrong your mis-pronouning them was.
This is not the only way. Perhaps someone shares an Infowars article with you or one that mentions Alex Jones. You may decide you don't even need to read it because it is Alex Jones who you have been conditioned to view as a "conspiracy nut", "domestic terrorist", "white supremacist", or some other label. You can ignore everything.
Remember above I said it is not an ALL OR NOTHING situation in most cases. You can read or watch something from any source without having to believe it is completely wrong, or completely right. You can read an article from someone you despise or think is crazy and still find grains of truth you may have been unaware of. You don't have to believe everything you read, see, or hear. In fact doing so is a very dangerous and naïve way to approach life.
Looking for reasons to discount something without actually looking at what was presented is not a very good way to do things. I have a huge pet peeve against the term TLDR. Sometimes something may be too long or too much for you to devote the time to at that time. This is one of the few good reasons not to engage. Yet you don't need to tell someone about the fact. It is even worse when someone says TLDR but carries on a conversation anyway.
This was my typical train of thought post. If I lost you at any point. My apologies. This is simply how my mind works.
EDIT: Those two Lysander Spooner quotes when considered together lead to some interesting corners of the mind. At least they do in my case.
Yup. Twitter people. Facebook people. I feel sorry for them. They don't get it. They say " okay boomer."
-- Mark Twain
okay boomer
My mother is a boomer. :P That saying won't work for too much longer as there won't be many boomers remaining.
Mhhh, I don't have much to add or challenge. Maybe an anecdote of just a few hours ago:
I was sitting in a German Chatroom discussing Alien Life. While I was listening to the arguments I still made clear that I think it is nuts to believe in aliens. Not that alien life exists, that is pretty obvious when you look at the size of the universe, but that somehow aliens have lived among us and controlled us and all that good jizz.
Like with almost all conspiracies it is hards to completely rule it out, but only the first video I was shown was really interesting:
It showed an inside film of an aircraft that flown away from earth and flew over the mars with people inside it. I was told this was one of the first Youtube Videos released so it is at least 15 years old from a time where faking videos was not as easy as today. I still some saw flaws in the footage shown.
My congnitive dissonance kicked into full gear when he tried to enrich his argument by showing some typical grey alien footage and some shiny lights in the skies. A strange looking puppet of a woman, which he claimed was a corpse of some human alien hybrid. Sorry but this just doesnt prove anything and I wouldn't even count the later videos as any form of argument for alien life among us.
After that the discussion shifted to ancient religions and how you can see references to aliens in there. A far more interesting approach, but I was already sick of it and left the room.
This was like telling me that you really like to live out your homosexual dominant nature in RPGs, just before asking me if I was interested in playing.
Hah... I'd be interested in seeing that first video. To see if I can determine how it could have been faked (or not) 15 years ago. I spoke to someone once on steemit that was convinced there were no nuclear bombs set off and it was all special effects movies.
I told him even with modern techniques I've not seen anyone make special effects that I couldn't see the particles and how it put together but the films from the 40s and 50s were doing things no one has faked as well. If I went off of that footage alone Nukes were a very real thing.
I didn't convince him.
I gave @frot a 0.1% chance that he is on to something. You should have seen how happy that made him! :)
I have no way to tell if sth is fake or not when it comes to videos and pictures, Im not very knowledgable on that field, just impressed witht the possibilities. But hell I think even flat earth has a 0.001% of being correct. I dont really have a way to disprove it. I also like to keep an open mind about things. Alien life among us I would actually rank rather high with somewhere around 1%-3%
Just look at the ocean from shore. The curvature is visible with the naked eye especially from high places. Cost of construction for airplanes rises sharply in order to be super-sonic and with fuel there is a speed sweet spot which is much slower than Mach 1. By looking at Air travel times between things in the southern hemisphere and comparing that with the northern hemisphere. You can compare distances between say Cape Town and Perth Australia. Compare that with New York and Paris. Off hand, I imagine these are similarly distant. If you want to waste several hours you can determine the Earth is round this way. Of course maybe change the cities so you can find direct flights. They must be direct flights.
I can see it with the unaided eye. So to prove it's round is like proving the sky is blue. So, I wouldn't bother. However, learning about methodologies is a fun waste of time.
14 h between Johanessburg and Sydney and 9 h between New York and Moscow 9 h. Ratio is 14/9. That is the former distance is 14/9 the distance of the later.
Using a globe map of the Earth, measure with measuring tape so it can follow the curve. The ratio will match. You will probably get different but you should find that the former distance is 14/9 of the later.
Do this on the projection that we grew up with at school. I cannot comment on how much this will be off. I chose points that would disprove the North pole centered version flat map. If you use that flat map, the ratio of the distances will be much higher than 14/9.
Seeing something with the eye is no proof. I have seen Godzilla attack Tokyo countless times, still I am quite sure it never happened. The earth might look round but it still might be an optical illusion.
Not sure what I am supposed to do now that I tapped a globe to my forehead with my Fingers pointing at Johannesburg and Sydney, but as far as I heard most world maps and globes are highly inaccurate.
When I think the Earth might be flat. It is more the question if we are not just curved in other dimensions but actually flat in the ones we know. Something along the lines of the earth is flat but its ends are completely connected in the 5th dimension which makes it appear round in our eyes.
Maybe you should just let people believe the flat-earth theory. They don't really need to know any better.
I feel like I'm a fucking alien, sometimes - does that count?
No! Definitely not! In the chatgroup I mentioned there is a woman that always says "I am not even human anymore!". If I hear that sentence one more time, I'm gonna smash my head into the wall until it stops to hurt!
...me in steem/hive for four years - get used to it!
It's all fake...
Nukes are as real as moon landings and corona viruses!
I replied before I finished. And no, I never got lost. It's like you have been watching my exchanges with people online.
Nice. Good post. I largely agree with what you say, although my definition of truth is different than yours. Does that prove your point? :)
I'm glad to see you here again. Cheers!
You live in Venezuela right? If so how have things been there? Things have gotten so insane and our media fixated on so much stupidity that I haven't heard much about things there in awhile. We are just getting hammered by nonstop propaganda here for the past few years.
No surprise when they remove all restrictions on using propaganda against the U.S. population.
Yes, I am. Things around here have slowly improved, basically the government has turned a blind eye to many of its own restrictions and allowed some certain freedoms, since the condition was untenable.
So yes, I would say that things have improved, although this is really far from good.
I am glad to hear things have improved for you. It has been steadily going the opposite direction in the U.S. We have either a bunch of people that are so ignorant they fail to learn from history or so evil that they know exactly what they are doing and it is getting bad. We seem to be heading in the direction of how your country went. The war to stop this is still ongoing but it seems to keep sliding in the wrong direction so at the moment that looks like losing. Hopefully we can turn that around.
Ignorance and evil usually go hand in hand. Often there is no perceptible difference. That is what makes them so inefficient, and so self-destructive, the problem is that they destroy not only themselves but everything else.
I hope you can avoid all that. Although truth is, you can never lose the war as long as you keep fighting.
Welcome to the house of the midwit.
'Please leave your logic and sanity at the door'
Good to see you back, things are a bit stagnant on Hive content wise and need a big kick up the arse