Читать книгу Unf*ck Yourself, Unf*ck the World - Kagiso Msimango - Страница 11

Only treat as gospel what you’ve experienced first-hand, or sourced from within.

To all other data add a bag of salt.

Our lives are shaped to a significant extent by the actions we take. The actions we take are influenced by the decisions we make. The decisions we make are influenced by the information we have. We are constantly trying to make sense of the world in order to inform decisions for our best and highest good. We gather information from various sources – first-hand, second-hand, third-hand, and so on, in various ways. Usually, when we have faith in the information we have gathered, we make decisions with confidence and certainty. When we are not entirely confident of the accuracy of the perceived information or the legitimacy of the source, we delay decision-making or are tentative in the actions we take, based on those decisions. The problem is that when we place undue faith in information that isn’t worthy of that level of trust, whatever is built from that shaky foundation is troublesome.

Information is a great way to manipulate people, because we use it to make decisions. This is why media is of such great interest to governments, organisations and other institutions, and why so much money goes into advertising. If you want to influence people’s actions, without the use of force, the most elegant way to do it is to manipulate the information people receive and can perceive. They then take action based on this information with no need for coercion on your part. This is not just about big things like the education system or censorship; it applies on micro levels too, such as when you lie to your boss about why you need to take the day off. We understand that the information we give to people, especially those who trust us, can have an impact on how they perceive reality and, in turn, affect their choices. Just like the parents who told their kids that a musical ice-cream truck is empty, the guy who lies about loving a girl in order to increase his chances of having sex with her, or the way politicians lie about a lot of things a lot of the time.

Soon after I was diagnosed with Adrenal Fatigue I found myself in a loose tribe of people suffering from autoimmune disorders. I called us the Sick and Tired Tribe. You’ve got to love this digital age – it’s so easy to find or form a tribe for any issue under the sun. In this particular tribe we bitched and moaned about our symptoms, our bleeding bank accounts, and how people didn’t really believe that we were sick, partly because the sicker we got the fatter we became. It is hard to convince people that you are ill while your thighs seem to be living their best life. You try to explain how a malfunctioning thyroid can lead to rapid and stubborn weight gain and you can almost hear them thinking, “Ooookay, that’s a very educated excuse for staying fat. Perhaps you should read less and run more, you lazy fuck.” As my energy levels began to improve and I complained less about being utterly exhausted all the time, questions were raised by other members of the Sick and Tired Tribe. I’d respond honestly, telling them about drinking solar-charged water, lying on the grass to boost my energy, and the like. Some were open and curious, while others either glazed over or were agitated. Many in the latter group would then bitch-slap me with “science”. Apparently, nothing that was making me feel better was valid because it didn’t make scientific sense. My question, then, is: “If it works, then who cares?”

The funny thing about doubters is that they tend to be the same ones who make fun of religious people, and yet do not realise that the science they spout can be considered their own religion. Have you ever heard someone say: “I believe in the Sun”? Probably not, because enough people have agreed that the existence of the sun is a fact, proven by shared lived experienced. However, people often make statements such as “I believe in God” or angels, or ghosts. This is a tacit accommodation of the understanding that this is a subject or issue of which we do not have definitive proof or a shared lived experience, so we need to introduce the concept of faith – “I believe.”

I have noticed with growing fascination how many of those who bludgeon believers (of any kind, not necessarily in anything spiritual) with “science, research or authority” never actually interrogate this “science” they use to silence or dismiss others. Like the “What’s your source?” guy on Twitter. Often, as long as an article includes the phrase “Scientists say …”, “Scientists have discovered …” or variations thereof, they swallow it hook, line and sinker with little or no interrogation. People who trade in clickbait know this. Have you noticed how many articles on the internet start with similar phrases? That’s because such headlines get clicks and shares. They rely on a combination of arrogance, gullibility and laziness on the part of the reader. These “rational” people may not believe in the esoteric or the mystical, but they sure do believe in articles containing the words “Scientists say …”

Humans have an interesting tendency known as conformation bias, a cognitive bias that causes us to favour information that confirms beliefs we already hold. Confirmation bias inclines us to filter out or ignore information that contradicts what we have already made firm decisions about. It has its uses. Confirmation bias helps us feel safe by creating a sense of certainty and stability. The problem comes when something in our lives is very broken and the change that is required involves re-evaluating or adjusting our beliefs. In that instance, we need to be open to new ideas and viewpoints. Because we associate safety with stability, we often want a particular life circumstance to change without anything else in our lives changing, particularly our views and behaviour. The thing is, if nothing changes – nothing changes. You can never know with 100% certainty if anything is true unless you have experienced it yourself, and part of increasing your ability to unfuck yourself is to trade in some of the safety that comes with certainty, for the empowerment that comes with being open-minded and having an increased tolerance for uncertainty. It’s a balance. Feeling as though you know too little is mentally and emotionally destabilising, yet deciding that you know a lot more than you do can get you stuck up shit creek without a paddle, as the Scots so elegantly put it.

Do not take as gospel any information that has been transmitted to you by someone else, especially when there is a lot at stake. Our information ecology is polluted. Never before in our history have we had so much access to information, and yet the vast majority of information to which we have access is shared by people, corporations, governments and institutions with agendas that are often opposed, to varying degrees, to our wellbeing. People tend to believe that just because pretty much anyone can publish information now, the playing field is level. This is untrue and naïve. You may start a YouTube channel that never goes beyond 10 views, even if you have valuable quality information, and Kanye West can start an account for his hamster and it will get the exposure you crave because, thanks to fame and money, he is more influential than you. You may discover a cure for cancer that is cheap and readily available to most, but you don’t have the resources that Big Pharma has. I am likely to find your discovery on page 15 of my Google search because you probably don’t know much about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or even if you do, all the keywords that matter are already owned by the current big players in the cancer field. Whether you like it or not, most of the information that ends up finding you has significant resources behind it, and the reason that most organisations invest a lot of resources into making sure their information reaches you is because they want to influence your perceptions and therefore your behaviour. These are not your friends; they aren’t sharing anything with you for the fun of it. They are investing in a particular return.

Most of these information sources aren’t evil, but because their own wellbeing is naturally more important to them than yours, they will manipulate the information they give you to favour them. This manipulation ranges from outright lies of commission, to lies of omission and cherry picking information, to people who don’t even know that they are being untruthful. I came across a pub named The Office. The owner told us that he named the pub such so that his patrons could truthfully say to their wives, “Honey, I am going to be home late. I am still at The Office.”

If you go to a market that promises goods at the lowest prices, you are probably there because you want to spend as little money as possible, yet none of the vendors are likely to say, “Well, you know, as cheap as this item is, I put a 150% mark-up on it, and if you drive three blocks in that direction you can get it even cheaper from my supplier.” This is not an evil person. It is just a man who wants to feed his family; that is his agenda, and your agenda, to get these goods as cheaply as possible, is not in 100% harmony with his, so he won’t volunteer this information.

The world is full of information corrupted by agendas in varying degrees. In a competitive environment, whether you are competing for money, power or any other resource, the manipulation of information can give you an advantage. It is normal, not usually sinister, but it can and often does get sinister.

I remember attending a talk on integrative medicine and one of the speakers, a medical doctor, said something that gave me the chills. She said that medical professionals often say, “There is no cure for your illness,” rather than, “We don’t have a cure for your illness”, and that small difference in phrasing will often influence whether the patient investigates other routes to deal with their condition or not. It reminded me of a story a friend once shared. She was on chronic meds to support a weakness in her heart, medication she was told she’d have to be on for the rest of her life. Ironically, her weakened heart was a result of some other chronic medication she was taking for a different condition. She started practising breathwork religiously and, at her annual check-up about a year later, the cardiologist was astounded to discover that her heart was fine and she no longer required medication. She excitedly started sharing with him how she’d fixed her heart. He put his hand up, a gesture to stop her talking, and informed her that he didn’t want to know. I understand why he stopped her in her tracks. As a cardiologist with education, experience, skills and a livelihood invested in what he does, he wouldn’t be particularly keen to know how some woman who writes copy for a living healed herself from an “incurable” heart condition. Most of the time people, and institutions (which are really made up of people) have an agenda when they share information. The quality of the conclusions you make based on this data is affected by how privy you are to the underlying agenda.

The parent who lies about the ice-cream truck probably doesn’t want to get up off the couch to chase after a stupid van in the sun, every single Sunday when the truck drives past, so he or she simply lies. A wilful lie of commission. Perhaps the cardiologist, someone who is viewed as knowing all there is to know about heart health, may come across other patients with a similar condition to the one my friend had and may continue to tell them that he doesn’t know how to cure it, only how to manage it with chronic meds. He will be telling the truth because he refused to find out whatever my friend had wanted to share with him.

Then you get those who are unwitting agents of someone else’s agenda. The poor boy who missed all those opportunities to fill his little belly with soft-serve because of what daddy told him, tells his younger sister, truthfully, that when the ice-cream truck plays music it means it has run out of ice cream. He is being honest, but what he is sharing is not the truth – only the truth as he sees it.

There is a very disturbing story about a multinational corporation that had to pay millions of dollars in class-action suits. Starting in the 1960s, this organisation went to poor villages in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and convinced poor and uneducated mothers that formula was much healthier than breastmilk. They trained “foot soldiers” from these communities, who were trusted locals, to espouse the virtues of their baby milk formula. These mothers were advised to stop breastfeeding and give their babies formula exclusively. This company would donate to the mother a couple of months’ worth of free formula that would last long enough for her to stop producing breastmilk, with strict instructions not to breastfeed the baby at all. But breastmilk works on supply and demand – if you reduce how much you breastfeed, you start producing less milk. If you stop breastfeeding entirely, you stop lactating completely within a few weeks. This organisation tricked these mothers into drying up their milk supply. By the time the women ran out of formula, the formula was no longer free. The mothers had no choice but to buy it, because they were no longer lactating. This company was only interested in maximising shareholder value and had zero fucks to give about the wellbeing of these women and their children. The organisation continues to thrive to this day, and I am confident that you still consume at least one of its numerous products, ranging from chocolates and cereals to infant nutrition products. If you want to find out who they are, I have given you enough information for you to type all the right words into a Google search. Unfortunately, their story is not that unusual. The locals who pushed this agenda for the multinational didn’t know that they were agents for such a horrific agenda, similar to soldiers who lose their minds, limbs or lives in wars thinking they are fighting for one thing, while the war is really about something else entirely.

It gets even messier, friend.

Sometimes information can be misleading – even when it is all true. A great example is how often people disregard natural, organic medicines and assume that pharmaceutical drugs are superior, based on the availability of clinical research. In biotechnology you can patent a synthetic molecule, but you cannot get a patent on a natural molecule, because it was made by Mother Nature, not in your lab. Most companies in the industry are not owned by benevolent philanthropists who want to save the world; they are there to make money, so they don’t bother doing much research on what they won’t be able to patent and therefore profit from. As a result, most of the research in the field is on synthetic molecules. Thus, many intelligent, rational people are inclined to believe that pharmaceutical meds are more effective and/or reliable based on the fact that there is significantly more clinical research on them than there is on herbs and plants. So we make the wrong inference based on the availability of information, or lack thereof. One such instance that tickles me is of how one organisation continues to mislead people without actually lying. This particular brand of cosmetics was founded by a woman who strongly valued the idea of sustainable business practices and doing no harm. Among other factors, the company did not test their products on animals. Their stores and packaging had large visible displays declaring, “Our products are not tested on animals”, which is partly what made them appealing to people with similar values. The organisation was later bought by a bigger one with a different set of values, and the line on the branding was quietly changed to “Against animal testing”. Spot the difference? If you were not paying attention, you wouldn’t think you needed to pay that much attention, you wouldn’t notice that a company that carries the first line can be sued for false advertising if it does test their products on animals, but one that carries the second line cannot. They don’t claim that they do not do any testing on animals, just that they are offended by it.

Sing with me, friend: “It’s a jungle out there.”

How often do you rely on second-hand information to make decisions? I bet you do it a lot – we all do. No one human has enough time or mental processing ability to do enough research to verify every single bit of data before making a decision. It’s like the time my obstetrician-gynaecologist recommended that I abort my daughter because, according to the tests he’d sent me for, she had a very high risk of Down Syndrome. I did not have 12 years to go study obstetrics and gynaecology, nor to understand what goes into those tests. I had only a few weeks to make my decision, and a highly consequential one at that.

This is our reality.

As Daniel Schmachtenberger, co-founder of the Neurohacker Collective laments, “We are making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sense-making to inform those choices. Like running increasingly fast through the woods, increasingly blind.”

A classic example that comes to mind is the HPV vaccine. There are tomes on its devastating side effects, including death and disability, and an equal amount of information on its safety, efficacy and necessity. Honestly, as laymen, you and I have no way of knowing what is true and what isn’t. Do you allow your child to get the HPV vaccination or not? You will probably use your pre-existing bias to decide the validity of the varied and opposing data on the vaccine. However, this is a highly consequential decision that should probably not be left to your confirmation bias alone. Do you gamble with your child’s life, leaving the possibility of her contracting cervical cancer to chance, despite the availability of a vaccine that may reduce that chance? Do you let your child get jabbed with a cocktail of God-knows-what and hope that all those people, who include medical professionals and industry insiders, who claim that the side effects aren’t worth the risk, are wrong?

I did not abort my child. Despite my lack of understanding of obstetrics and gynaecology when I made my decision, I didn’t at all feel like I was running through the woods blind. If you go on YouTube you will find a very enlightening and crucial conversation titled The War on Sense Making on how to make sense of a world that is constantly waging a narrative warfare. It’s about five hours of conversation between very smart people who will often make you feel like your IQ is probably in the single digits, but it’s worthwhile. I, however, used an entirely different approach to decide whether the data that my ob-gyn had presented to me was truthful and would enhance my wellbeing. Later I share those tools with you, because it’s rough out here, friend.

However, first I want to tell you about my cluster fuck.