I wrote the following blog in 2016 just before the Presidential elections that year. I am often guilty of too many political rants. I wrote the following blog and four others on the search for Truth and the relevance of facts, data, and evidence in this search. Some of the issues I describe here happened 9 years ago but as you will see, they are just as relevant and pertinent today as they were then. In fact, they are even more so. Regardless of your political persuasion, it is important to understand how Truth can be found and whether or not we are being lied to and conned. The US government has for many years developed a variety of means to obfuscate, ignore and/or stretch the Truth. If we as citizens can see when this is happening than we shall surely be forfeit to any mistreatment that comes down from the Government. I worked for almost 20 years to teach some of these ideas to private business, non-profits, military installations and many levels of government from city to state to federal. This blog is part one of the education I think we all need to deal with what I would call “the Search for Truth.” You will need to read all five parts to get an honorary degree in Truth Seeking and Truth Finding. Following is the start of my blog written in 2016
I watched several shows the other day in which Trump supporters were interviewed. People are as curious about his supporters as they are about Trump. Given the unquestionable fact that Trump is a greedy sexist racist hate monger, why would anyone support him? The assumed knowledge is that his supporters are a bunch of ignorant losers: people who are uneducated or at best semi-literate. However, the data and demographics do not entirely support this conclusion. Many Trump supporters are intelligent educated and literate people. These are also people who believe in the United States of America and care about their country. What then persuades or convinces them that Trump is the right person for the job of POTUS? His qualifications pose a questionable proposition that would seem to fly in the face of all known facts in the entire universe. This dilemma strikes at the heart of the matter. We do not know what to believe any more. What is a fact? What is evidence? What is objective data? Where can we find facts that are truthful (not really a redundancy)?
I think about my graduate students at the college where I have taught for many years. These are students who are working on an MBA and are highly literate, highly educated and highly intelligent individuals. Many of them already hold very well paying jobs and responsible positions in successful companies. Nevertheless, the challenge that I continually face is to teach them the difference between facts, data, evidence and truth. Despite their literacy, few of these students understand the difference. This is a scary situation. If these highly educated students do not understand the difference between these concepts, how can we expect the many uneducated members of the general public to understand and comprehend the essential elements of truth finding? I say essential because facts, data and evidence are the three pillars of truth. If you do not have these, you cannot find the truth.
Several problems make the issue even more complex. In academia, we are dealing with a subset of life in which there is much less confusion over the truth since no one is deliberately trying to distort, lie or sell us anything. There may be stupidity, lack of knowledge and even ignorance by many scientists and professors but the greed motive is much less tangible. I am not saying it does not exist, but for most of my teaching career, I cannot think of anything I have ever tried to sell to my students and make a profit on. I can say with some confidence that this is also true of all the instructors whom I have ever known or worked with. The same situation does not exist outside of academia. The marketplace is a vicious jungle when it comes to searching for the truth while academia is a tame zoo in comparison.
When we enter the marketplace and even more so in the political arena, the motive to convince us of something relies much less on elucidating the truth than it does on obfuscating the truth in order to sell us something. Wells Fargo Bank wants you to open a credit account. They don’t care whether you need it or not. Volkswagen wants to sell you a car even if they have to hide the truth about pollution levels. Every politician in America wants you to vote them into office. They don’t want you to know the real truth about their competition or that they do not have all the answers to the problems facing our country.
Companies and politicians have a vested interest in hiding the truth from you. Stories like Miracle on 31st Street where Macy’s sent people to Gimbels are few and far between and exist mostly in fantasy. Similarly, stories about politicians with ethics such as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” have become legendary because they depict a reality that seldom exists. Most politicians will promise you the moon to get your vote and most companies will not tell you the truth about cigarettes, drugs, food or anything else unless forced to do so by some form of government regulation or mandate. It does not matter whether it will kill you or not as long as you buy it or elect them.
Finally, we come to perhaps the biggest ruse of all. If anyone is searching for the truth, they will eventually enter into the Fourth Estate. This hallowed ground is defined as: “A societal or political force or institution whose influence is not consistently or officially recognized. Fourth Estate most commonly refers to the news media, especially print journalism or The Press.” (Wiki). Thomas Jefferson believed that the two pillars of a democratic society were an educated citizenry and a free press. Mark Twain was somewhat more skeptical about the power of the press and information to inform people when he noted that: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” The truth seeker has been taught since early childhood that in the domain of the Fourth Estate is to be found the truth. Little do they know the quagmire they have entered into or that the role of truth finding in the Fourth Estate no longer exists.
Today, the major purpose of the news (whether print or digital or video or audio) is to sell. Sell, sell, sell, sell and sell some more. Sell junk, sell drugs, sell expensive credit cards, sell stuff and more stuff. Stuff you don’t need, won’t need and will probably never need. The job of the media is to convince you that you do need stuff, that you desire stuff and that you can not possibly live without stuff.
I once thought that journalists were a group to be respected. This was based on the knowledge that they had often risked their lives and their reputations to bring us the truth. Today, journalists are little more than pimps for advertisers. They have sold their souls to the devil, descended into hell and may never come out again. The measure of a journalist is not how much information they provide to the public but how many advertisements they can sell. The changing role of journalists has made it even more difficult for people to find the truth. Nothing in the news is remotely objective or unbiased any more. Every paper, every station has their spin on things. The spin is determined by who owns and controls the media.
Take polls for example. As we go into the final days of the 2016 US presidential election, you can find polls that favor one candidate or the other candidate. If there are seventy polls, half may favor one candidate and half may favor the other candidate. There is no truth even in these so called unbiased statistical polls. Many of my friends have suggested that the news media want the race to be close because this keeps people tuned in. Much like a sports match, we would rather watch an event that had a pair of evenly matched contestants. My friends have suggested that the news seems to do its best to insure that first one candidate gets major media attention thus elevating them in the polls and then it switches to the other candidate providing them attention that elevates their poll numbers. I am not a big conspiracy theorist but this theory does seem to have some merit to it.
Regardless of whether the media intentionally want to keep the race close or not, there is no denying that the candidate who is the most obnoxious, the most outrageous and the most sensational will garner the most press. Trump has been well aware of this and has continually manipulated the media into providing him billions of dollars in free advertising. The fickle public seems to swing from one candidate to the other depending on who they see in the news. Trump has undoubtedly benefitted from his ability to keep the press absorbed with his every utterance regardless of how inane they are. He can tweet at 2AM in the morning and be assured that Fox News will carry his tweet on the 7 AM morning news.
How then can we blame the general public, educated or not, of being uninformed or misinformed when most of our society is conspiring against them finding the truth? It is a trap that I have fallen into when I have railed against the stupid, illiterate and uninformed Trump supporters. Sadly, they are not to blame for their reliance on Trump to give them the truth. The have certainly not found it in academia or the Fourth Estate. I have some solutions to this issue but I do not have the entire answer to it. I do have part of the answer. It is quite clear to me that one must understand the difference between facts, data, evidence and the role of these three elements in helping to shape the truth. In Part 2 of this blog, I will go into the subject of Facts in more depth. In the following parts, I will cover Data, Evidence and Truth.
Time for Questions:
How do you know what to believe? Who do you trust to give you unbiased information? How much do you trust the news? Are you satisfied with the quality of the information you get from journalists and the news? What do you think we need to do to improve the quality of information the American public receives?
Life is just beginning.
“There’s a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don’t have to think, you just have to get more information – gets very dangerous.” — Edward de Bono
Donald Trump is not America. Donald Trump is a creation of a media empire that is out of control. A media that trends sensationalism, exploitation, fear and paranoia to feed a 24/7 system of so called news reports. A system of glitz, glamour, ads, sound bites, commercials, sex appeal and worthless trivia that has little or no educational or informational value. It is a system that neither informs nor educates. It is a system that thrives on the likes of Donald Trump. It is a system that thrives on the exotic, the unusual, the strange, the bizarre, the kinky, the outlandish and the far out. Donald Trump is all of these things but he is not America.
Donald Trump is not even a real Republican. The party he claims as his own is one he and his small band (less than 9 percent of the total registered voters in the USA)* has managed to co-opt. The Republicans that I have called friends over the years want nothing to do with him. They are as appalled as the Democrats are at Donald Trumps rise to popularity in the media polls. Americans however should not be surprised at this. It is not the first time that a fraud, demagogue and charlatan has captured the media stage. Looking back through US history, we can find similarities between Donald Trump and the likes of Aaron Burr, The Know Nothing Party, Huey Long, The Silver Shirts, and of course Joseph Mc McCarthy. None of my Republican friends would avow affiliation with any of these characters. They are not America and neither is Donald Trump.
Every country in the world has its right and left-wing extremists. It has been this way for hundreds of years. Fortunately, in the USA, our political system usually kicks out the extremists and the middle ground or centrists have always trumped the left and right-wing fanatics. Due to our political system, we have escaped such maniacs as General Franco, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. There are many drawbacks to our political system and chaos often seems to be a major characteristic of it. There are many people who would discard such a system in favor of stability and security. These people would buy such a political system at the cost of freedom and liberty. In many nations throughout the world, citizens select benevolent dictators rather than trying to deal with the vagaries and uncertainties that are often characteristic of a US style democracy.
Donald Trump says that he will create the largest wall that the world has ever seen, but it won’t keep out immigrants. It will only keep out ideas and innovation. Donald Trump supporters include the misguided and fearful who believe that if we only had less poor people, less immigrants, less refugees, less minorities, less disabled people and less women in power that “America Would Be Great Again.” This is a delusion held by those who dream of a bygone era when “Father knew best, Blacks knew their place and women stayed in the kitchen.” The myth of “The Good Old Days” is almost impossible to kill in a population fed on media mediocrity and where real history is either not taught or understood. Donald Trump will not bring back the “good old days” because the good old days where not really that good. Donald Trump will not “Make America White Again.”
What all of Trump’s bombastic speeches fail to note is that America is still great. Unfortunately, the things that make America great are hidden behind the media pronouncements of Donald Trump and his ill-advised followers. The ceaseless stream of bad news, crime, bizarre and weird news that titillates so many also deprives us of being a well-informed populace. In addition, our outlandish media system simply serves to hide the many great values that the USA stands for.
The message of hatred and intolerance that spews daily from Trump is something that one could pity Trump for if it were not so dangerous and belligerent. It is hard to feel sorry for the bully that is kicking other people when they are down. Somewhere though, we know that such bullies are really cowards. Their intolerance and lack of compassion towards others is driven by fear and insecurity. No matter how big and bad the bully seems, they are the biggest cowards in the playground. It is time to put Donald Trump and his followers in their places. There is no room in America for bigots, sexists and racists who are intolerant of and lack compassion for others. We need to keep America great by letting the world see the true values that guide our nations and not the distorted hate filled messages that the media loves to display.
Marching forward in time to the period of the Revolutionary war when George the III was ruler of the American Colonies, what did they think of King George? Here is what is written in the Declaration of Independence:
Aging Capriciously 