Oh, she haunts my dreams. She gives me the tingles.
I can’t resist.
I must resist.
Should I resist?
Like her voluptuous counterpart of my teenage years, this titillating tickler isn’t real. She’s a fantasy, a figment of imagination. But this time, it’s not my imagination but theirs.
The entities that would seek the power to control you under the guise of protecting you (take your pick, I’m sure you can name a few) are trying desperately to shield you from those vile harbingers of ‘mis-information’. How heroic!
But it doesn’t exist.
It’s simply ‘information’.
It can be factual, afactual, interpretable, fanciful, and a myriad of other things, but it is never ‘misinformation’.
‘Misinformation’ is just short for ‘misleading information’, which implies you need to be “led” in the first place.
I don’t know about you but I’m not a sheep. (Though, I do enjoy making the odd sheep sound in the car for stress release. It’s milder on the vocal chords than outright screams. I save those for the really bad days.)
I don’t need to be led.
I’m not above critique, or advice, and yes, I need help sometimes, but I don’t need to be led. No, thanks. For one, they don’t know where I’m going (or where I should go). And maybe I don’t want to go their way.
Anyway, back to this rabbit hole problem for which I have a fun analogy:
Imagine the world you know (or is presented to you) looks like a large, perfectly manicured, green field (Lady Tottington’s, if you will). The field beneath you feels solid, foundational, firm under foot. Then you see a rabbit and walk over to its hole. You enter the hole and come out somewhere else in the field. Your world has changed. No longer is it a perfectly manicured lawn anymore. There are holes in it! Then you see another rabbit (or is it the same one?) and chase it down another hole, popping up somewhere different yet again. Hmm, this field is not what you thought it was. Now, if you keep doing this you’ll begin to notice bunnies and rabbit holes everywhere (picture the scene of Wallace and Grommet arriving with the Bunvac at Lady Tottington’s residence). Pretty soon the whole field is like swiss cheese with as many holes as there is solid ground.
It’s like drawing. There’s postive space and negative space. Neither are ‘real’, per se. You can use either one but you need a frame of reference, either way.
You will have to act regardless of whether your ‘perceptual’ field has lots of holes or only a few and whether you’re in a hole or standing next to it. That is the inescapable part of existence. No guarantees, no warranties, no exceptions.
Now, let’s use covid-19 as a modern day example of ‘misinformation’ - only to be found of course in a rabbit hole (oh, those tricksters!) The press, the govts and their cohorts would have you believe that certain things are simply true and other things are simply false. But why should you trust them? Just because? They do love to present their world of information like a lawn manicured to perfection - no flaws, pristine grass, solid ground. But wait, you see a lagomorph poking out. That shouldn’t be there! You investigate and down the first rabbit hole you go.
But how far do you go? When do you stop?
When you want to, when you need to. It’s consequential
For instance, right now there are some who think covid-19 isn’t real, viruses don’t exist, it’s all Bill Gates and New World Order. Are they right? Are they insane? Looney even?
I don’t know, but more importantly I don’t care. I don’t have to.
Those people are generally not in the business of trying to control me so I will meet them half-way or wherever I need to. I don’t need to doubt them and I don’t need to agree on everything they say either. I have finite energy and finite resources. I don’t have to go down EVERY rabbit hole, lest I’m prepared to suffer the mighty pressure of infinity pressing down upon me, fragmenting my perceptual reality more than my being can handle. I can acknowledge a rabbit hole and choose not to enter it. I can always check it out later, if I so wish.
And don’t forget there are much bigger rabbit holes. The kind of gaping existential holes that will swallow you whole, and mercilessly if you linger too long. (A quick peek once-in-a-while will suffice to open your eyes.) Peruse at your own peril.
The problem is you cannot assess the truth of most things when they get broader in scope because as a human you have a limited capacity, limited power and limited time to do so. But you’re still gonna have to act. So use your best judgment, faith, acting with controlled folly, having to believe or abandoning yourself to the spirit. The only power that is really yours is your decision. The outcome is something altogether different.
When I think of this perceptua dilemma, I often recall a delightful Far Side cartoon from many years ago with several characters looking at a glass of water. One says ‘the glass is half-full’. Another says ‘the glass is half-empty"‘ and the last one says “Hey! I ordered a Pepsi!” Or something to that effect.
The dilemma is utlimately: which rabbit holes are the good ones? The bad ones? The necessary ones?
I don’t know. It’s all trickery to me. That artificial lawn especially.
So no, there is no ‘misinformation’. It’s all just information. The problem is not really information. It’s with power.
Joe Billingwaddle, the plumber down the street, who thinks covid shots are secret nanobots manufactured by Bill Gates to infiltrate the synapses and take over the world isn’t my problem. His body, his thoughts are his business. If he only wants to help me fix the toilet and pipes, we’ll do just fine living together, despite our differences. He’s not selling me a fake lawn. (I’ve got one already.)
I can’t say the same for those who try to persuade me the lawn is all there is.
I’ve seen entirely too many rabbits at this point.
I found 2020 to be all about epistemology: How do I discern what is true? The untrustworthiness of the media forced me to act as my own authority, struggling to sort out what was true from what was manipulative. That was terrifying, as the consequences of believing the wrong things were severe.
Over time, I gravitated to several high-integrity people that I developed trust in. And I've gone deep down several rabbit holes, even while dreading moving away from the verities of the surface world. That took my being willing to make judgments as to what I felt/reasoned was true. It was damned uncomfortable. Even today, I hesitate to describe what I've learned to someone who hasn't heard my views, because I've ended up far from the mainstream.
An interesting consequence of this search: I found myself moving away from the Left, due to its embrace of censorship, authoritarian tendencies and the Intelligence Community. I found a surprising amount of truth on the Right (mixed, to be sure, with a lot of craziness). I've become more open to acknowledging truth where I find it. A recent speech by Sen. Ron Johnson, someone I don't agree with on almost anything, gave the absolute finest speech on the pandemic I've heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b08Hi3kBpSs&ab_channel=ForbesBreakingNews It was heart-felt, non-rhetorical and strikingly sane. Those traits are so rare in public life these days.