Misinformation Train

Daily, individuals are bombarded by all kinds of information about people, events, and theories. Currently in the news, there is talk of car-sized drones above New Jersey, a murder/assassination of a healthcare CEO, and the constant fear of what could potentially be called Word War Three. These are just a few examples. This is the age of unlimited communication with the internet and dozens of news stations bombarding us with both useful and, more often, useless information.

How many really care how Snoop Dog cooks his bacon?

Trying to sift through all the pointless articles to find real news can be a challenge. Even when we find “legitimate” news, we are left with conflicting or bias explanations, distorting the facts. The truth is always elusive. CNN focuses on attacking the conservative minded people while Fox News bashes the liberal audiences. It is a media war that continues to rage and become more volatile on a daily basis.

Dispelling misinformation can be a nearly impossible task. Humanity needs to accept that there are always agendas being played out, conspiracies in the works, brutal fights for power and really bad boxing matches on Netflix. Truth is the hardest thing to see through the thick fog of misinformation. Yet it is there!

One must ask themselves, what is good? What is positive? What benefits humanity the greatest?

There are so many distractions that pull us from the truth. Unfortunately, I am not even sure Occam’s razor can cut away all of the garbage that encloses the truth. So why is it so hidden? Humanity wants to shield itself from accountability and conviction. Hide the truth, then make your own morals that benefits you, the individual, not humanity as a whole.

Wokeness thrives on hiding and distorting the truth in order to move its own agenda of denying accountability. Even if you take God out of the equation (theoretically), humanity cannot survive without a moral structure. For example, there are people who want pedophilia to be a “sexual orientation”. Unbelievable. This act is detrimental to children and emotionally damages them for the remainder of their lives. Nobody would benefit from this behavior if it was accepted. Instead, it drives humanity down a road of self-destruction.

I understand this is an extreme and disturbing example, but the same case is truth for rape, murder, enslavement, theft, genocide, etc. These acts push society closer to chaos and has no benefits to humanity as a whole. Within the philosophical ideal of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill puts forward the “Greatest Happiness Principle.” In this, actions are “right” in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and “wrong” as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

This “happiness” is not based on the individual, but rather on humanity. Moral actions will benefit all people while immoral actions are the ones that hurt people, even if the person or persons acting benefit from it.

Our goal should be to strive to reach the higher “good” for the human race as a whole. The less suffering, the more we will find happiness in living. The “anything goes” attitude will lead to the destruction of civilized society. Cut through the garbage that the misinformation train dumps on your doorstep.

Be the insurrection.

Isn’t It Time?

Too often, we wait on the currents of life to push us down the river. Occasionally, we dip our paddles in the water to make a slight change of direction, but eventually, we fall back into the original current. What if we are being led to a plummeting waterfall?

Is it fear? Is it apathy? Laziness?

How do we not see the drop-off ahead of us?

Many take no effort to guide their course. We don’t challenge the river in order to find a better path towards a fulfilled life, instead we hope the river will lead us to the ideal life. Unfortunately, letting the world determine your morals and ethics leads to a waterfall where we are crushed by the rocks below. It is an emanate disaster.

It is very easy to rely on the current to move you along, and it is also easy to sit back and do nothing to control it. Living a good and moral life is not an easy path to travel. It is going to take a lot of paddling and steering to stay on that current. It does require choices made and actions taken. A person cannot hope to quickly find this higher moral stream and glide down it in their sunglasses and pina colada in hand, forgetting their worries. One must constantly be striving to find the “right” way to live; a moral path that can bring us happiness, hope and satisfaction. It is not a path easily attained.

The first step is to break away from the world’s mindset. Morality is not a democracy! We cannot let a “majority rules” determine our ethics. There are principles that supersede the faulty, corrupt nature of human beings. learn to read the waters and make the adjustments to bring yourself in line. Humans are unique in that we have a very assertive conscience unlike other living creatures and have an inherent knowledge that there is right and wrong. We may not know exactly what is right and wrong, but we know that these measures exist. Somewhere deep inside everyone there is a moral compass.

It is time to take action! Dig the compass out of your pocket and put those paddles in the water. Take charge and fight the current.

Solving the Cube

As a teenager in the 80s, there were so many memorable items that came out to entertain us. We worked out to Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons via VHS, the CD player slowly took over vinyls, high top sneakers, MTV, and leg warmers, to name a few.

We were also introduced to a mental torture device- the Rubik’s Cube. How many hours were wasted trying to line up colors on a block? More than I care to admit.

Solving this puzzle is like trying to make sense out of life. It is not impossible, but it can be difficult. People approach solving a Rubiks many different ways. This is just like how we approach life’s meaning differently.

Some people will analyze and make careful turns, spending more time thinking than acting. Others will constantly spin the sides, hoping that they will solve it by dumb luck or by accident. Of course, there are people who will give up and say it is impossible. Deception also takes a role. There are those who will peal off the stickers and replace them to make a completed cube, attempting to impress those around them.

You can take all of these methods and apply them to how people approach morality. Do we sit back and analyze, rarely acting? Jump on the bandwagon of the latest idea and hope that we will find the answer? Or, worst of all, do we peel the stickers and shape morality to fit ourselves?

It takes a steady balance of insight and action to solve this puzzle and living the moral life.

I challenge you not to ebb and flow with the times,  nor give up due to it feeling like a “hopeless” cause. Focus on what is good and right, thinking and acting that way. Don’t peel the stickers to shape something that fits you. It is a dangerous path to take, one that will do more harm than good. 

Find your center and align your blocks around that.  It is not impossible to solve the cube, just as it is not impossible to solve moral living.

“The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.” – Albert Einstein