“He’s always late!” complains the boss. It turns out, however, that he’s late 8% of the time over the last year. But the boss doesn’t know the numbers; he’s content just to go with his perception.
“Our church really follows the Biblical principle of tithing,” boasts the member. He has no idea that never once in the Bible is there any record of Jesus or the apostles ever teaching the Christians to tithe. He has never quantified this “principle” in which he so adamantly believes.
“War is good for the economy,” is the way that she helps herself feel better about the latest war. Never once, however, has she done the slightest amount of economic study to see what really happens to the economy in a war. Little does she know that war only helps a precious few and hurts everybody else.
“We’ll make a killing if we build this new mobile app!” That’s what the entrepreneur fervently proclaims to his partner. But the fact of the matter is that he has absolutely no market research to show that anybody would buy the envisioned app. He knows nothing except that he can see a need for the app.
“These rocks are 65 million years old.” This is the confident assertion of the science teacher. But he is only repeating what he heard from some other science teacher, who, himself, did not do any analysis or experimentation to support that predetermined conclusion. As far as he actually knows, his position is no less certain than is the position of the guy who says “the Tooth Fairy created these rocks from some egg shells and a Stay Puft marshmallow last March.”
“People everywhere are waking up politically!” That’s the ecstatic utterance of our recently-“awakened” friend who assumes that because he has “awakened”, that many others are awakening too. He has no idea how many, of course, and is speaking more from excitement and wishing than anything else. He will make no effort to calculate what percentage of folks are “waking up”, but is content to continue in this assertion anyway.
“Most people just aren’t intelligent enough to become good overseers of our Republic, Jack.” (Or, “Most people just aren’t intelligent enough to study the Bible and to figure out the errors in their church doctrines, Jack.“) Really? From what studies are you getting this data? And who told you that it’s a matter of intelligence, rather than of rational thought, which has hardly any correlation to intelligence at all?
Our hearsay culture is wearing itself out with what it thinks it knows! We are so utterly wrong so often that I think I’m noticing a trend where people are forgetting even to care about being right! When someone comes along who wants actually to fix things, he stands out like a dandy at a rodeo.
I keep a list of dumb junk people post on Facebook: misattributed quotations, religious twaddle that could not possibly be proven from the very Bible upon which it is supposedly based, pop philosophy (preposterous junk like “You have to hit rock bottom before you can really change.”), political “facts” that aren’t facts at all, and so forth. In other words, I’ve been counting. And I’m taking note of how often it is that I correct someone’s hearsay, and yet they never take it down or edit it to be consistent with the facts. And I notice how many times “Washington” is blamed for doing things that the People are supposed to keep Washington from doing.
We’ve got a real mess here, folks. It’s quite ugly. And the real kicker is that it’s completely avoidable. If America had a “fact check” button on her computer next to the “spell check” button, she sure could do herself a lot of good by clicking it before pressing the “submit” button. Indeed, who in his right mind would want to publish an untrue or erroneous thing to the world?
Here’s a test for you.
- Do you have a link to an online dictionary saved in your “favorites”?
- How about a link to Wikiquote.org so you can verify quotations before sharing them with the world?
- Do you use the calculator before tossing out numbers?
- Do you keep links to surveys so that you can post your documentation every time you mention whatever fact the survey claims to prove?
- Do you write footnotes or other reference lines into your blog posts or Facebook posts?
- Do you even read stories before sharing them on Facebook?
- Have you ever once read the Constitution before arguing about it or insisting that it ought to be followed?
- When you read a quotation attributed to some famous person, do you check it out to see if they really said it?
- Does it bother you to be wrong?
We could accomplish so much if we could just set the record straight. It stands to reason, however, that it takes willing people to set a record straight and to keep it that way. What I observe around me, however, is people who throw their hands up in the air in dismay and disgust and who do not bother to lift a finger to bear the load of national (or any other kind of) reform. They are content, rather, to complain about those they believe are causing the problem. Thus do they demonstrate to any and all objective onlookers that they don’t really want anything fixed; they just want to complain.
What a miserable way of life that is.
As a guy who habitually figures out solutions to problems, I want you to know—and I hope you will believe me when I say that there’s nothing personal here—that you’re a big fat boat anchor chained to the ship of what ails us. You are the reason that it’s so hard to change anything. You are the engine that constantly pumps out misinformation. You are the boulder that refuses to budge from the pathway. You are the one who thinks that you already know plenty and that the problem is with “those people over there”.
If you, dear reader, happen to be one of the people I’m talking about here, you might even catch yourself thinking about how right that last paragraph is about someone else you know, rather than yourself. But here’s how you can know for sure that I’m talking about you. Just look at the beginning paragraphs of this article and see if any of those notions are ones that you habitually repeat or think. If, after reading this article, you don’t go and “do the math” on these things, but continue to think and repeat them, then you are exactly the kind of person I’m addressing. If you are so helpless as to be unable to reform even yourself, why should anybody listen to your constant griping about the world around you?
Life is short; why not do something extraordinary while we are here? Do some math for yourself once in a while and see what a powerhouse you can become in this helpless world!
“The problem with internet quotes is that you never know if they are authentic” ~
Abraham Lincoln
