With everything that’s going on in life – all we’re involved with or asked to become aware of – where are we to turn for a reasonable and honest yet empowering sense of where we stand and what we can do? While there are clearly many, many voices out there hoping we’d lean on them as our trusted source of information, who exactly “are” those voices and where might their advice be leading?
Asking that, the inference must be that people have an agenda – a position, interpretation or perspective they’re hoping we’ll take up as our own defining worldview. As if everyone’s already moved a few steps away from raw, unvarnished “reality” to offer, instead, their view of it and conclusions over the paths we should walk within this vast landscape of options.
Maybe we’re simply supposed to choose? Select from the offerings of media, industry, individuals or tribes those we’ll let inform the ideas we have in mind and steps we’re likely to take. As if this world’s now carved up by these theories spun around it: the basic camps and various sub-groups we each found our way into and may struggle to leave.
What’s behind it all? These bodies of thought that spread their tendrils through our intellectual space suggesting how we might view things and the overarching picture into which we should be slotting our facts. What kind of reality are people hoping to usher in instead of this one? Which principles, starting points or values form the foundation for their thinking?
Viewing these voices as akin to beacons guiding our path or lighting our way, what are we allowing power over us? Telling us what we’re seeing and how we should see it seem incredibly powerful functions within groups of humans endowed with the capacity for thought. Aren’t our minds, our ideas, the frame through which we view and respond to life? The vehicle for our freedom, perhaps.
And, in that bigger picture, how many are concerned more for our personal experiences than for the collective realities we’re effectively helping create? It seems incredible how much life’s been deconstructed into these basic, individual building blocks many are vying to influence in order to bring their visions to life – the overwhelming, stressful complexity of it all.
Given so much seems commercially driven – and, that the complicated nuance of truth may not sell as well as audacious, fear-inducing lies – might it be that our understanding of reality isn’t what we might hope? Within it all, how often are voices genuinely motivated by humanity’s wellbeing rather than having something to gain or to sell?
Behind whatever masks any given voice might be wearing, how are we to discern where to place our trust? Somehow holding back in the face of this insistent confusion and finding strength to judge for ourselves what’s going on here. Because, if reality’s overly carved up, could we not position ourselves to heal those divisions with a more expansive worldview instead of exacerbating whatever problems we inherited?
Notes and References:
Channels of information
Understanding & staying informed
Reading between the lines
Which voice can we trust?
Who should we trust?
Having confidence in complex systems
Being conscious of our constructions