Brighter tomorrows

Yes, yes, yes ... there has been a good deal of frustration in the last couple of posts. I'll be the first one to admit that. After all, there's a lot to be frustrated about. If you stop to be honest with yourself, there are a lot of things not working these days. A lot is broken. Some things are on their last legs, and if some changes aren't made soon, I'm afraid a lot of people are going to get hurt. I'm not exaggerating. Dying of starvation, being thrown into poverty, losing everything you have, contracting a fatal disease ... those are all very painful, and it is precisely these things that are not occurring less often. All of them are on the rise.

I can't be the only one who see this. I can't be the only one who can figure out that the trajectory we have put ourselves on is not going to end happily without some changes. And, I can't be the only one who has figured out that some of those changes aren't going to be to my liking, but that doesn't make them any less necessary. So here's the deal:

Decide what it is that you want to give up. Everybody has to give up something. Every change starts with ourselves. We don't get more ... we have to give more, so you have to decide what it is that you want to give. It's not about you. It's never been about you. It's about your friends, your family, your children, your grandchildren. It's about people you never met and people you never will meet.

Oh, and before you get carried away, it's not about your political involvement, how you vote, or what shows you watch or what news you listen to. It's about you deciding what you can do to make the world a better place. Not better for you, but better for someone else. If you're not making the world better for someone else, you're not making it better at all.

Holy moley

When you are considered by some to be a cynically optimistic curmudgeon, my last post really isn't all that bad. At least it's not out of character. Which came first, the character or the cynicism will have to remain a chicken-and-egg question. I don't think it much matters.

I know, I know, there are lots of you out there who still have hope for the world, and I can assure you that I'm glad you're there. I doubt you're going to have much effect, bar some unforeseen world-altering event, but as the Germans like to say, hope dies last. What nevertheless amazes me most, I think, is the degree of denial that we humans are capable of.

Think about it for a moment: When you have to pump almost $30 trillion into an economic system just to keep it afloat, just how robust can it be? When you have almost 10 million people dying of starvation alone every year, how effective can business be? When three people own more than 48 countries combined, how fair is that? When it is obvious that we've got huge environmental problems but we insist on business as usual, how smart is that? When we give up freedom after freedom in the name of false security, how do we explain that to our children? When everybody is wrong, how can anyone be right? Yes, these are big-ticket issues and for every one of them there are literally millions of people who deny that any one of them, let alone all of them, is true. And I'm supposed to have hope in a brighter future?

Sorry, no can do. Sorry, my sleep-walking friends, but it's time to wake up. The first step, says Lao Tzu, is the hardest, but it's one everybody can take: drop your opinions. Stop talking, start listening. How hard can that be?

The whole hole

If one opinion is as good as any other, then none of them has any value. Things without value cannot serve as the basis for Values. And so, here we are in a valueless world. How great is that?

In a desperate attempt to salvage something from it all, we've reverted to "worth" as a replacement. After all, the words are very similar in meaning, so the transition hasn't been all that difficult. Unfortunately, the words only appear to be similar in meaning. But what else can we do?

Not much. We are not allowed to have values anymore because the opponents of my values decry them as mere opinions. And everyone who doesn't share my values, well, they're just not worth talking to. (And if you stop for just a second to look at how "values" and "worth" were used in that last sentence, you'd realize how little the two words have to do with one another.) And that's precisely what happens. We no longer talk to ... we only talk at.

Political debate has become nothing more than the repeating of positions until the other either agrees or stops listening. Religious debate has become nothing more than the repeating of tenants of faith until the other agrees or stops listening. Educational debate has become nothing more than repeating of alleged principles until the other agrees or stops listening. In the end, what they share is the fact that there is nothing more than opinion being spouted, and no one is listening.

Perhaps the most effective marketer of all time, Josef Goebbels, is well known for his adage: if you repeat the lie often enough, the people will believe it. And that's where we are, whether we like it or not, and whether we want to admit it or not. Everybody's bought into the same lie: opinions matter.

Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century, and all we have to offer the world are opinions: economies are better than societies; my god is bigger than your god; my students are smarter than yours; my team is better than your team; my clique is cooler than your clique; my ... well, you can fill in the blank.

Almost 2,000,000 years of human history (or roughly 6,000 for you fundamentalists) and that's all we have to show for ourselves. Don't we have reason to be proud?

Deeper in the hole

Opinions are not restricted to just the political sphere. That's where we encounter them quite often, and it is there that it's most apparent that we're dealing with opinions, but, truth be told, they're everywhere ... in every major sphere of life.

Let's take economics. We love to talk about that, don't we? Like I've said so often, we traded in our society for an economy, so all we ever talk about anymore is how much stuff costs? Who's going to pay for that? Why do I have to pay so many taxes? And it's all based on what? Right – opinions. Free markets: opinion. They don't exist; never have. Add one cent of government subsidies to anything and that market is no longer free. Which aspect of our economy is unaffected? None. Who are the biggest advocates of free-market economics? Those who receive the biggest subsidies: banks, defense contractors, private equity speculators ... and more and more the broad masses of people without much of anything, for they've bought into the opinion that if it's free, I have a chance too.

Or, what about religion? We've got at least two related religions running around claiming sole access to the truth: Christianity and Islam. In both cases, however, it is just one variety of the religion that dominates the discussion, namely the fundamentalists. What gets me is that they both claim the same source for their rightness: the Big Guy Himself. What are the claims then really based on: opinion, what one has chosen to believe.

Or, education? We don't even teach facts anymore. No one learns to write, to express thoughts, to think critically, to debate ... why? Because it's all politically incorrect. Since when has political anything been the determiner of what we need to learn in order to be conscientious citizens? Oh, I almost forgot: citizens are members of a society, and we don't have a society anymore, just an economy, and how educated do you have to be in order to consume? Consumers shouldn't be too smart, they might not buy my stuff.

We're a lot farther down the hole than we like to admit, aren't we?

Down the hole

And therein lies the rub, as Bill once wrote. We can't and don't know what's right, because we can no longer agree. And we can't agree for the simple reason that we can't talk with one another anymore. We love talking at others, but there's as good as no more talking to. We can't discuss and debate anymore, because we no longer acknowledge that the other person has anything worth listening to. Everybody's entitled to their opinion, and makes none of them right, and none of them wrong. Everybody has one, and those folks who agree with mine are the good guys and everyone else is a bad guy. Isn't that how it works?

If we're honest, that's precisely how it works. When I was growing up – and I realize that was a long time ago – we thought that opinions were the result of thinking, not a replacement for it. But that's changed. I'll give Fox News one thing: they call themselves a news channel but they admit they aren't one; they have clearly defined hours when they broadcast news and everything else is opinion. No, the vast majority of their listeners/watchers/fans don't know the difference, but at least they have made it known.

You can't argue with opinions. They aren't based on anything. They are merely individual (or prescribed) interpretations of a personal selection of facts. We still use words like "truth" and "justice", but they don't really mean anything. "Truth" has come to mean "agrees with me"; "justice" more or less means "got what I think s/he deserved". And that's it. Our entire social and political debate has been reduced to little more than he-said-she-said. I find that just a little more than sad.

Beside the hole

For those of you who have been suffering through these "hole" posts (not post holes ... please note the difference), you have to be asking yourself about this time, just where is all of this leading. All I can say is that that is a another excellent question. Nevertheless, I'm going to try and answer it, and to do so, I'm going to make use of two very popular words ... at least popular these days ... for the simple reason that they will be used in a sense much closer to their original intent than is thought of today.

What have we got? Fundamentally, our beliefs drive our opinions, regardless of the facts; what is more, the facts, in and of themselves, are of little value, they just are. On the one hand, then, we have those who believe in the stability of their beliefs, that their beliefs are the right beliefs, that the reason anything functions as well as it does is because of how they believe. We'll call these folks "conservatives"; that is, those who think that things should pretty much stay the way they are. On the other hand, we have those who believe that just because a lot of folks believe something doesn't necessarily make it right; there could be different things to believe at different times or in different places. We'll call these people "relativists". (Gotcha, didn't I? Admit it, you thought I was going to write something very different.)

What's wrong with this picture? What should be wrong with it, you may be asking. It looks just fine to me. Well, if we stop and reflect for just a moment, why should there be only two positions to take on this: conservatism and relativism? Why isn't there another, if not other, way(s) of looking at all of this? Well, there is. And it's what we're going to call, for lack of a better word, realism. Yes, it's just that simple to redefine somebody else's words. We should never forget that language is just that: language, a way of expressing our understanding of reality. And, in deference to the master, George Carlin, I might add we can't say things in our own words, just in those words that everyone else uses as well.

So, there we have it: conservatives, relativists, and realists. How do we know who's right? Can we know what's right? How do we decide what's right? Those are the pressing questions for the moment. The short answer is: we don't.

Back to the hole

Facts in and of themselves are just that, facts. Opinions, even informed opinions, are just opinions. They don't tell us what is good, bad or indifferent. They really don't tell us anything (other than what is or how something thinks about something). But, in the end, they're really not all that helpful. Why?

At bottom, what makes a difference is really only that which matters, that which has meaning. But meaning for whom? How do we determine what something means. This is a much more difficult question, believe me. It may even be the most difficult question of all. Why? Because when all is said and done, we find meaning in those things that we believe.

This may sound banal, and to a certain extent it is, but it is nevertheless deep, and not everyone is ready to dive into that deepness. What am I talking about? Let's say, just for the sake of argument, Joan believes in free-market capitalism. How does she interpret the "facts" about starvation in the world? Let's say, for example, that Tom believes in a redistribution of wealth, if necessary, forced. How does he interpret those same facts? Who's "right"?

Yes, here's the rub. What the facts tell us, what they mean, depend, in the end on what we believe, in particular how we believe the world functions, whether money or G-d is at the root of all things, what we believe democracy to be or what we understand when we use the words "freedom" or "liberty" or "government" or "wealth" or any number of other abstract concepts that can't be corralled in fact or statistics or numbers.

No, in the end, it is our beliefs that drive our thinking, our understanding of numbers, our interpretation of reality, our opinions and our knowledge. Everybody can't be right, and everybody can't be wrong. But, the biggest part of our unending discussions don't center around facts, or statistics, or anything, except what we believe ... and we tend to congregate with those who believe the things that we do too.

I only bring this up because while we think we are being oh so convincing in our argumentation, that we are so persuasive in our presentations, in fact we are merely telling others what it is we believe. And the question that immediately presents itself, of course, is why is that what you (or I) believe better than what somebody else believes? Yes, just why should that be?

Over the hole

How do you figure out who's got the best numbers? I know you're not going to like this, but we have to now ask ourselves what do we mean by "best"? Are the best numbers those that most accurately describe the phenomenon in question, or are the best numbers those that we like the most? Good question, I think.

What I've been leading up to over the past few posts is that for as much as we may like numbers and quantitative data and all that objectivity, truth be told, they aren't as objective as we would like. The numbers can't really tell us anything. The numbers are, depending on how we approach them, merely one way of describing whatever it is we are looking at. The numbers aren't just "there", independent of us. There are only numbers there when we choose to count. This is what my conference-attending friends need to remember. And it's what you need to remember, as well, when you read something – including my posts – where numbers and statistics and data are presented.

The question we have to be asking ourselves is: So what?

The Unites States is the richest country in the world (in terms of GDP). About 33% of all workers worldwide are unemployed or poor. The Germans (or Australians) consume the most beer per capita in the world. (It depends on the year ... there seems to be an undocumented competition going on.) Only about 16% of students pursuing a bachelor's degree in the US attending college full-time. The number of young people pursuing a college degree in Germany is about 28% of a given class year, while in the US it is almost 50%.

The response to each and every one of these statements must be the same: So what?

At best, these are facts, even if every one of these facts is a statistic, a number, something objective. But facts are just that: facts. They don't really tell us all that much, do they?

Around the hole

My question is, why is everyone entitled to an opinion? Shouldn't we be saying that everyone is entitled to an informed opinion? How can we tell the difference? I mean, an opinion is an opinion is an opinion, is it not?

One thing we can do is question the opinion-giver as to the reason for that particular opinion. We really should get over our overly sensitive politeness at least enough to determine with the opinion we're being confronted with is informed or uninformed. It makes life easier and is relatively painless (unless the opinion-giver is presented uniformed opinions and feels particularly strong about them ... but we have a word to describe that too: it's called "prejudiced"). And then?

If you've been following the last couple of posts, you may be coming to the slow realization that determining what's worth listening to is a matter of effort, and Lord knows, we moderns aren't all excited about effort. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but living in the modern world just ain't as easy as it looks. Yes, we have to start deciding which back-up evidence is good (or acceptable) or bad; we have to figure out a way to evaluate the evidence and the resulting opinions. (And for those of you who may have lost sight of my train of thought over the last couple of posts, we're now going to come back to the numbers.)

In the absence of any other measure, we tend to think that numbers are somehow "objective". The person with the best quantitative evidence must, of course, have the best opinion. After all figures don't lie, do they? But, as a wise person once noted, all liars figure. No, it's not as easy as we'd like. And there we are, once again ... immediately ... back in that ol' hard-work dilemma. We need to figure out now who's got the best numbers.

Out of the hole

Well, is it? I mean, is it comforting that we can get along without numbers, statistics, quantitative data ... proof? You see, as long as we were talking about anecdotal evidence (that's what my experience is) and the situation is "good" (and we aren't going to debate what that means, at least not at the moment), we tend not to care. It's not an issue. But what if it's a different situation and the notion of "good" is not as obvious?

Let's take government funding ... for anything actually. Is that "good"? Well – and this was my experience at the conference – all of sudden, opinions started going in all kinds of directions. You will notice, please, that we're no longer talking about "experience" (that was something we shared), rather we're talking about "opinions" (something that, at best, groups of people share). But, since were back out of the rabbit hole, how about we ask ourselves just what an "opinion" is. It's really not something we think about everyday, even though they tend to play a truly significant part in our lives.

IMNSHO, there are two fundamental types of opinions. The first is "the result of giving thought to a particular topic or issue". We think about things. We look around. We examine evidence. We look at various perspectives (notice I didn't say "the other side" of an issue ... there is invariably more than just two sides to any issue). We come to a conclusion. That is, we have an opinion. Some folks like to call these "informed opinions". They are, in a word, the result of thought. The second type we can characterize as "a replacement for thought". We just think things are a particular way and say so. There's really no thinking involved. We don't bother looking around. There's no examination of the facts or evidence. We know the answer before we start. That is, we have an opinion. Sound familiar?

"Everybody's entitled to their opinion." Have you ever said that? Have you ever meant it? Is that something you agree with? If you don't, you take the risk of being run out of town on a rail, don't you? But, it's quite clear, without even delving into the subject very deep at all, that not all opinions are created equal. So now what?