This isn't the biggest, but I had a moment like this last year. I realised that almost everything published, and some people I interact with professionally, are pushing an agenda and warping reality to suit their own ends. It sounds naive now, but I used to create content for the love of it and to for greater understanding (through writing, music, art), I had no angle, and I thought others were doing the same. It's now my view that 99.9% of conversations, posts, articles, books etc are some one or some group pushing an agenda to either get more money, power, or influence. It's actually quite hard, I think, to get to the objective truth anymore. One example, I know a good salesman who sets himself up a trusted consultant - but is pushing you in the direction of whatever product he getting commission for at that moment and time. It's like Orwellian double speak - 'the consultant' is someone you've brought in to help you but are in fact helping themselves. Further, any publication produced by a business will support their worldview and why you should buy their product.
It's changed me in the following way. I try to strip away the entire facade to see where either the money changes hands, or where the advantage is for the producer of the content (cui bono). When looked at in this simple way, you soon see what's really going on.
This. So true.
Computing literature (especially in short from - read blog) is to blame.
You no longer require the polish once required to publish. Furthermore, publications have a short lifetime, so you’re easily able to get your audience to forget the past. Finally, there’s no system (formal or otherwise) designed to filter. It creates a world where popularity is truth.
Then how do you cope with the constant feeling of seeing people as enemy ? recently I read Adlerian Psychology, from The Courage To Be Disliked [1]. Adlerian adviced we should see people as comrades as opposed to enemy, if people taking advantages of us, is their own task, not us. that way you live a life a simple way.
I'll take a look at this book, I haven't heard of it before. Thanks. I guess I don't see people as the enemy (but I'll watch out for that as it could be easily done), rather I try to see what they are trying to achieve, such as financial gain or otherwise, and make a decision from there. Rather than getting swept up in the reality they are projecting. In Meditations there's a passage about seeing things for what they are, like good wine is just grapes, the best steak is just a cow and so on.its about stripping away the layers of advertising/propaganda to see the objective truth.
The quote from Meditations that I mentioned is the second one below, the first is more succinct;
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth"
"Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Perceptions like that—latching on onto thing and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.”
This isn't the biggest, but I had a moment like this last year. I realised that almost everything published, and some people I interact with professionally, are pushing an agenda and warping reality to suit their own ends. It sounds naive now, but I used to create content for the love of it and to for greater understanding (through writing, music, art), I had no angle, and I thought others were doing the same. It's now my view that 99.9% of conversations, posts, articles, books etc are some one or some group pushing an agenda to either get more money, power, or influence. It's actually quite hard, I think, to get to the objective truth anymore. One example, I know a good salesman who sets himself up a trusted consultant - but is pushing you in the direction of whatever product he getting commission for at that moment and time. It's like Orwellian double speak - 'the consultant' is someone you've brought in to help you but are in fact helping themselves. Further, any publication produced by a business will support their worldview and why you should buy their product.
It's changed me in the following way. I try to strip away the entire facade to see where either the money changes hands, or where the advantage is for the producer of the content (cui bono). When looked at in this simple way, you soon see what's really going on.