A Brave New World?

We are at war! Not with a horrific enemy. Not with ISIS, or Al Qaida, or Russia, or even China. We are not at war against the Coronavirus. We are at war with ourselves!

I’ve asked myself “WHY?” I’ve searched my mind and I’ve search my soul, and I’ve come to a conclusion. We have a crisis based on a lack of trust! Nobody trusts anyone anymore, if we ever trusted anyone, ever. I recall my early years and I think we trusted a lot of people. We trusted our neighbors and they trusted us. We trusted our Leaders, the milkman, the postal workers, the teachers, the preachers, the news broadcasters, the doctors, and the police. Why don’t we trust these people now? What did they do to earn our mistrust?

In my estimation, they haven’t done anything different, but we have. We are constantly believing what we read that feeds our biases. We’ve actually always done that but today, we see hundreds of different sources of information every single day. 60 years ago, we had maybe 3 or 4 sources of information. These sources either fed our biases or they provided an alternative point-of-view. We took it all in and sorted it through our filters. Today, information comes at us from so many sources and so much of it is misinformation! If that information feeds a bias, we will, most likely, just accept it as truth. If the information is contrary to our bias, we will very likely reject the the information. Either way, without a little digging, what we accept as truth and fallacy runs a very real risk of being completely wrong. Because too many of us are accepting misinformation as being real, honest, absolute truth, huge swaths of society have been maligned.

How can we trust people who think, look, behave, and believe differently than us? It’s nearly impossible as long as we accept the very biased proposition that such people are bad, or even worse, evil! In order to trust those who are different, we must recognize our biases, deliberately set them aside, and wholeheartedly declare that it’s not only ok to be different than me, but actually celebrate those differences. Jesus did not tell us to only love those who think, look, behave and believe like us. He said “love your neighbor.” He said, “as you have done to the least of these, so have you done to me.” He welcomed the outcast, the adulterer, the tax collector, the sick, the lame, the poor, the homeless. He only excluded those who hard-heartedly excluded others. But, even for those he left the door open. Change your ways from hatred to love and you too can become part of the family.

We can turn this mess around. It will mean taking a risk. It will mean being open and honest about our biases, and we all have them. Think of the things that people say and do that make you angry. Why do you get angry? Because of your bias! Our biases are not bad. But acting based on a bias, when huge chunks of objective evidence says it is wrong to do so, now that’s bad! And it’s not ok to cherry-pick the evidence you want. That’s bias at its worst. A major part of the problems we face are a direct result of cherry-picked evidence. When you only consider the data that supports your point-of-view, that’s bias at work. Setting our biases aside opens us up to many possible outcomes; some good, some bad. But, if we can get others to set aside their biases as well, the chances of negative outcomes are greatly reduced. The more we can eliminate bias, the more positive the potential outcomes become. In order to turn this mess around, we must reduce the impact of bias and increase the influence of trust.