I have been fooled often in my life and everyday I have to acknowledge my mistaken ideas and beliefs.
We can’t help but be fooled. All of our lives we have been subject to gatekeepers filtering critical information from us. We have had well-meaning people try to influence us to believe as they do. We have the pressures from society and we have our own internal struggles about what is helpful for us to believe and do.
Before the internet we rarely could get evidence of other points of view. Sure you could go to the library but that was a slow and time consuming way to learn and often the books were biased and out of date. Now we both have the most helpful and worst sources of information to choose.
It is understandable people are confused and believe things contrary to their self-interests. Critical thinking is hard and it takes practice and time. We don’t value critical thinking and education and it shows in the values we have as a country. When you are born ignorant you tend to stay ignorant and that is a sad fact of life.
The truth is that challenging what you know and what you have been taught doesn’t come easy. Unless you see a therapist or have a friend gently challenge you, people tend to always believe what they have been taught. Lots of unhelpful things happen when we don’t look at our beliefs and ugliness stems from ignorance.
Everyday I learn something I think to myself “I am glad that I don’t believe that wrong thing anymore.” I am glad to become more in tune with reality and kindness favors reality. Yes there are many unkind things in the world, but reality is not unkind. We have to face the consequences our our decisions and that is realistic not unkind. We shape the world with every decision or every lack of thought of decisions.
What future of the world do you want? An unthinking one, or one in which we can continue to grow as a species?