Who to believe

 



Subject: Who to believe.



Everyone has an agenda. From Vladimir Putin to the person pushing their right to self identify as a man or a woman. Watching our television screens or following our media channel we are bombarded by view points which clash with our own and which it's impossible to even try to find sense if your attempting to seek accommodation. The impasse in the American Congress between the views of the Republican and Democratic Parties is so acute as to level a claim that, in reference to each other they belong almost to a non humanoid ideology so great is the gulf between them.
So, to all intents and purposes the assumptions we make as to our uniformity, the need to see each other with an almost divine like sanctity, is blown apart by that little box sitting on our shoulders, the brain, which lacks the subtlety to define everything from first principles. If your background, the place you were raise in is Asia or the Middle East, Peru or the Galápagos Islands, Serbia or the Hebrides. If you were born into Hasidic Orthodoxy, Amish traditionalism, Muslim monotheism or an Atheists disbelief, it's all in the mind and has nothing much to do with a proven  analytically structured proof. The mind, other than a trained scientific one with open peer review, thriving on submitting new discoveries to examination prefers to flow with the crowd and its multiple prejudice. Political noise alone is enough to wrong foot most of us as we listen to the latest plausible crank in full flow on a media channel. We have become a multitude of competing ideologies each supported within its own society each tuned in to what it wants to hear confirming its own prejudice.
There was a time when these ideological views were largely a private matter, views floating in the confines of your own mind and because they were largely singular thoughts, there was no sense of momentum in them, no collective conformity, the individual urged on by the numbers revealed to hold a similar opinion, that opinion gains weight
The young are happy to seek their news through 'You Tube' honing in and dialling up a specific news item and ignoring much of the rest they become mentally suburban. Their education is almost totally limited to what they already have an interest in the idea of reading a broad reaching, inter denominational magazine like 'Prospect', is an anathema.  Dipping ones toe into to multitude of hotchpotch opinion to gain some semblance of where the other opinion is coming from is too much trouble, especially if you are cursed with the current trend, short-termism  where the effort required to link one thoughts into the another viewpoint is too much trouble and cuts against a the scattergun opinion and counter opinion which is the daily diet of most people.
We are each unique as we travel down the short path of survival, coping with diversity and animosity in equal measure learning who and what to trust, like animals on the Serengeti sniffing the wind and the spoors, trying to stay just one step ahead.