Before you go off on a tangent, the statement is not religiously oriented. There is no way to prove what we can barely understand which is the state of belief in higher powers, Gods and religious systems. On a personal level, one can have an experience that absolutely is factual and true for that person yet the experience cannot be communicated to anyone else in a way that they can determine the veracity of the experience. Richard Bucke wrote "Cosmic Consciousness" as a guide to various types of experience that, like Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" attempted to explain the difficulty of explaining consciousness expanding experience to anyone else. So my question had nothing to do with religion. My statement was politically oriented but at the time, I didn't phrase it that way in part because I didn't want to bias answers.
I have asked the question many times to many people and have had few satisfactory answers. Under the Bush presidency, I got a lot of people who intimated that Bush lied about WMDs and the war in Iraq in general. But since these people were predisposed to dislike Bush 43, it would be hard to believe (no pun) that they found anything he said to be truthful anyway.
So I refined the question as I was met with blank looks. I had to ask specific questions and limit the scope of the answer to get any response. For example, I asked, "Do you think the average American is more free than citizens of other countries.?"
Most people simply said yes. So I indicated things you could do in other countries that you couldn't do here. I mentioned the very liberal drug laws in Holland (The EU hadn't formed yet.) and the Artistic freedom in both Japan, South America and Europe. But most didn't know anything about art. Virtually all knew about drug laws and had strong opinions regardless of whether they knew facts or not. Yes, opinions abounded concerning drugs. Drugs were either good or bad depending on whether the person used or didn't use drugs in some way. So I asked the drug question in two parts: "Should drugs be regulated at all?" and "Do governments have a responsibility to regulate drugs the government considers harmful."
In this situation, I got a majority of answers over the years but all centered around the premise that some drugs should be legalized and taxed (The European model.) and others should still be illegal. A few said that all drugs should be controlled and distributed/taxed by the government. What is interesting about this is that virtually everyone said that government should control drugs. Americans want government to control drugs and other things they considered harmful in some way. Then I wondered what had happened to thinking where literally everyone wanted government to do something. If one looks at something like abortion, both the pro-abortion and anti-abortion people want government to adopt their position. But does government have a place in regulating something like abortion? If I asked that question, everyone said yes.
So the belief question came to what people believed government should and shouldn't do. In all my years of asking this question, I only had two people state that government should not get involved in anything people do on a personal basis except to control people who try and stop people doing what they want. The exception were activities like murder, theft or anything else that involved another person.
I asked people what happened when they found that something they believe true turns out to be false. One example was in advertising. But most people think that ads are deceiving anyway. Currently I hear people restate what they have heard on the news and what they state directly effects which news shows they watch. It's kind of like listening to people's speech styles to figure out which sitcoms they currently watch. Sarah Palin was tagged with a statement that she could see Russia from her house. She never made the statement but Tina Fey from Saturday Night Live did. The numbers of people who echoed the Fey line and attributed it to Palin was astounding. Here are people making evaluations of a political candidate quite willing to accept something as true that had no foundation in truth at all. People believed the statement was true even when shown the Fey clip.
Back in the day when Marshall McCluhan's "The Medium is the Message" ruled media thinking, people were gaining a small glimpse of just how much of our opinion is based on either the misuse of facts or the distortion of facts to create untruth from truth. But how does one figure this out? People are working far too hard and have far too little leisure time to really investigate what they are told by any number of sources. To use actual statements from people is almost impossible unless one follows everything a person says. Besides, this may be more misleading than one would think.
I knew a HS student taking one of the HS AP History Classes to get college credit for work done in HS. I happen to have an extensive library about history and historical figures. So I loaned actual writings of people he was studying. He used these books and failed his assignments. He failed because the teacher wanted specific sets of responses based on how he was teaching the concepts. In other words, something like Jacksonian Democracy was learned a specific way and anything that Jackson or his detractors wrote was immaterial to the way that part of history was being taught in the class. Ok, the study of history is really the interpretation of facts to fit an ideology but actual statement from the person being incorrect over an ideology seems like a stretch to me.
So is what you believe based on a self-supporting ideological system designed to control your thinking or based on self-discovered facts?
FB
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