Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
1. Get off Facebook.
Or at least stop reading the news feed. If you can’t bear to cancel your account, at a minimum limit your interactions to people you have met in person (and know they are who they say they are).
They could still be crazy, but at least their influence will not be exponentially amplified by Russian bots or personas designed to manipulate you psychologically by analyzing your personal data (which includes pretty much everything from your entire life history on the internet).
2. Name check every source.
Who wrote it? Who published it? If you can’t name names then whoever put it out there is not credible.
Credible sources (unless you’re Bob Woodward and you’re talking to Deep Throat) do not disguise themselves. They work for credible publications that have fact-checkers on staff who publish regular corrections when they discover they’ve made a mistake.
Look for evidence of credibility — don’t believe what you hear just because somebody you know said it (though that’s a tiny bit better than believing stuff somebody said anonymously).
Nobody knew who Q was — they didn’t care. People got suckered into passing Q’s messages to others as if it was the single source of truth, yet nobody knew where this so-called truth was coming from — and look how that turned out.
3. Stop listening to people who don’t know anything.
I am fortunate enough not to have any close relationships with Trump supporters. But if I did, I would ask: Would you call a plumber to fix a window? No. So why did you support a presidential candidate who knows nothing about our history, our system of government, or the Constitution?
4. Stop denigrating higher education.
I get it. Some educated people like to use big words to confuse others. That makes you feel stupid. But that doesn’t discount the fact that they know things about subjects most of us don’t. We need to value education, not use it as an excuse to punish those who have had the luxury of attending college by pretending they learned nothing.
5. Stop pretending Americans are exceptional.
I wrote about this earlier in The Myth of American Exceptionalism. It’s simply not true that we are better than other people. Look around. In terms of education, housing, healthcare, and pretty much every other benchmark there is we are behind many other advanced nations.
We should be looking to those who have solved societal problems effectively and we should learn from them. Instead, we stamp labels like “socialism” on countries that merely attempt to pool resources to take better care of everybody.
6. Stop trying to make everything absolute, all or nothing, black or white.
We need a hybrid model for our country. We need democracy for voting, socialism for basic needs like housing, education, healthcare, and food. We need capitalism for all other markets, but it needs to be regulated just enough to avoid corruption and criminality — not so much that it hampers efficiency.
What we need is moderation, not extremism. People are good and bad. Government is good and bad. We need to learn to toss the bad and maintain the good based on how well systems work, not on the emotional reactions we have to their labels.
7. Pay attention to motives — and always follow the money.
Every con man who has profited from COVID knows that most people don’t look beneath the surface. Start looking. Ask yourself what, if anything, the person telling you stories is trying to get from you.
What’s their motivation? How do they profit from it?
We need to use our critical thinking skills now more than ever. It shouldn’t be that difficult — we just have to find ways to prevent our limbic systems from overriding our brains.
The first step is avoiding triggers, like Facebook.
If we can take back our power to choose what we believe instead of blindly operating like machine learners with bad data, we have a chance to turn things around.