So...who do you trust? For me it boils down to two important components: a capacity for understanding and honesty.
As much as one might not trust the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex, they've got the capacity for understanding that honest Betty Sue from Deming, NM doesn't. As far as medicine is concerned, research on the Internet doesn't count. It's possible your local pastor might not have the philosophical training to understand what pomos or neo-Marxist are saying. The face on TV is reading a teleprompter. Economics requires high-school math unless you're a genius. You need to find folks who have the capacity for understanding.
This is what the capacity for understanding does not mean: they come to the "orthodox" opinions. Honest, intellectually equal folks have differing viewpoints. Again find the best that each position has to offer and find different ones. It also doesn't mean an "expert" or someone with a Ph.D. As anyone who has first-hand experience with something might suggest, there's a lot you can't find in books (or intelligentsia). Often times the "shocking" discovery is made that most laypersons understood something all along before the cognoscenti caught up. Not a mystery; it's called common sense. People are stupid; people aren't stupid. Plus laypersons and intelligentsia share a prejudice for my favorite passtime: bsing.
Honesty is a hard virtue to really embody IMO. Its simplest level is not lying and not trying to deceive others. Another is the issue of acting in good faith and sincerity, conditioned by a process of relinquishing self-deception; here the news/blog business often fail. Thirdly is an openness to others that allows oneself to be known. You're not looking for this with news, unless you're talking about friends. In fact I'd be suspicious elsewhere too, precisely cause that "personableness" is often an illusion intentionally manufactured to engender trust. This third level is more of participating honestly in community where it's appropriate.
To elaborate on the second part, good faith is the intent to fulfill expectations that one is leading others to assume. OTOH, people need to watch out for false expectations. If someone is completely aware of what they're doing and how the public is incorrectly perceiving them and they do nothing to correct or even capitalize on it, that's bad faith. If you watched the previously posted clip, that's what Crossfire was doing. It's often rationalized that "everyone" knows its a game, but that's not an excuse. Intentionally legitimating an unqualified authority is also bad faith. The ways which corporate news do this are inexhaustible. Feigning neutrality is a classic example of insincerity. Revealing assumptions and allegiances is a big help to avoiding this particular form; stating them and going on to pretend that these aren't affecting anything while proceeding to promote propaganda is not.
What I'm not suggesting is honesty = transparency. Privacy is a good thing. It is also not assuming falsely assuming responsibility for every falsehood or mistake that one has or expecting it of others. We're human, which entails a level of imperfectionism and a willingness to risk being wrong. Especially with professionalism in the equation, people always act differently in front of an audience than otherwise. This isn't insincerity per se. It also ties into false expectations, as you're not "betrayed" if in real life they're different from how you'd imagined them.
Many folks employ what we like to call a hermeneutic of suspicion in a totalizing fashion, and that's bad. They're not just being critical, arguably an epistemic virtue. They're attempting to move beyond this to reveal or uncover or "unmask" what's really going on behind any argument or group, which might not even be conscious to the author/speaker/people. It is reading between the lines par excellence. Now as a caveat I'll say this, it is sometimes appropriate to employ a hermeneutic of suspicion, particularly when people act or events are suspicious! So it's not an either/or deal like I'm making it out to be. The reason I say it's bad is cause they're destroying the possibility for a healthy relationship and discussion (assuming it can be had). They're showing a fundamental disrespect for and insincerely engaging others. On the other hand if their hermeneutics leads them into dialogue with the subject, perhaps that's a sign they're employing it appropriately. Generally that's not the case, and they're impervious to relevant feedback. Indeed, often times they'll deconstruct sciences (which I actually think is a good thing), but then not understanding what's been discredited interpret in such a fashion as to ignore any findings. Please note: this is a blog, not a rigorous examination on any philosophical articulations but a commentary and critique on their abuses. These aren't hardline distinctions obviously, and it's completely possible for someone to be acting in bad faith, insincere, and deceiving themselves at the same time.
Some good reasons not to trust someone. The widely heldness of a belief in what their articulating. The task is verifying not taking for granted. Authority, especially an unqualified one. They really need to be field-specific competent; news sources bring these in all the time. Prejudices. Now we are all prejudiced. We have a whole range of preferences when it comes to trust, from the symmetry of the face, to how closely they look like us, whether they're ideologically similar, their tone of voice. This is something that's still being explored, in the mean time we need to be aware and be careful. All these are HORRIBLE reasons to trust someone.
There's two important senses of trust, and they shouldn't be confused. There's the idealistic version of trust and a sense of realist trust, where we trust others to behave consistently to themselves. While we can open ourselves up to the first, the second can be just as reliable. For example, if someone has consistently "stolen" something from you, they've probably broken your idealistic trust, but you can have a realistic trust that they'll do it again should the opportunity arises. News sources can be trusted and relied on in this second regard. Are they competent? If not they can be trusted to need someone else to interpret and get their facts for them. If we're talking about the junk food, I can list off examples from NPR to CNN to Fox.
Final thoughts: learn to trust yourselves. If you're male, learn to work on self-deception (trust me on this). It's easier to trust yourself if you're in community, but that's a different issue. "Strangers", that includes all news sources, need to earn your trust. If you go around naively giving the benefit of the doubt, you're gonna head straight to cynicism. Rather cultivate maturity with your trust. Take risk on insignificant issues for example, and as said before, to be wrong is human and insignificant. Randomly review what is being said. There's lots of ways.
Thoughts anyone? On the post, news, dinner?
No comments:
Post a Comment