I thought this today when I was reading the news headlines. Don’t believe the hype.
You can believe the facts in a story, but the interpretation is rarely the truth. I am not arguing for what I want to believe, but rather that it takes discernment and critical thinking to get to the truth of things.
What is critical thinking? It is doubting the face value of what you are told. I spoke about this before. Everyone has a financial incentive to spin things that are more beneficial to them. It is why the rich are so distorted in their thinking. Instead of human values, they think in terms of profit and how it can help them.
When our values are about money, we will always have the worst kind of society. Everything that we experience has been due to the small and large decisions that all of us make. If we want a healthier society we have to start changing our way of acting and believing.
I was wrong to pursue material in the past. It was an unworthy use of my time. I was wrong to seek to make others wrong. We have enough ignorance inside ourselves to keep ourselves busy for the rest of our lives correcting it. We don’t need to point out other people’s faults unless we have a legal responsibility to do so.
Hype is anything that people want you to believe. It is the idea that certain things are true always, and without any kind of context or condition. Life is sacred is hype. Not all life deserves to live. This isn’t a value judgment, but saying that life is sacred is a value judgment. We should respect the life of course, and we should nurture it when appropriate. However, there are clearly times when life is inappropriate, dangerous, and destructive. Those times clearly need a different set of values. (Cancer for example for those who can’t imagine an exception.)