A few years ago I had a teacher who encouraged us with a simple but powerful phrase: “Question Everything”. But he did not stop there in his crusade to wake us up, he even challenged us by offering a reward for the student who could identify a lie—intentional—in his speech during the school year.
Anyone could think that his attitude only encouraged distrust. But I truly believe that on the contrary, it reinforced our confidence. Our confidence in our decision making.
Over the past few months I have been shocked by the amount of false information created and distributed on various social media sites. for the purpose of deceiving audiences to believe in the interests of a few or just to generalize chaos to alienate the public from a specific topic.
Propaganda in North American elections and the war in Syria They are the main examples of the clear existence of this powerful misinformation machinery that undoubtedly affects our perception, and literally modifies the fabric of what we call reality.
In the past I used to think that the worst thing that could happen to a society was to be ignorant. Why not, when most of the social sufferings of a civilization can be attributed to them. And the worst part—I thought at the time—was that ignorance was inherited from our ancestors like a disease inscribed in our genes. If we are not stimulated from an early age by our parents to learn, we will hardly be able to break the ties to the habits that we learned by coexisting with them. It is not impossible to combat ignorance from within an ignorant training core, just as many patients learn to live and overcome their genetically transmitted illness, and the first step is always to accept the illness.
But there is a disease more dangerous than ignorance and that is misinformation. If ignorance is diabetes, misinformation is the flu. It doesn't seem harmful at first, but on a deeper look we discover that it is a virus, and like all viruses you could be a carrier and have transmitted the disease without knowing it.
Misinformation is highly dangerous because contrary to ignorance—which is a lack of knowledge—Disinformation presumes the existence of knowledge for the sole purpose of not making room for any other piece of information that comes later. Disinformation exploits trust in sources, but more importantly, it exploits the naivety of the ignorant who will take any piece of information without questioning it for the sole purpose of filling the gap that ignorance has left them.
In these times, anyone prefers to be informed—even if it's a lie—than to be ignorant. Socially it is shameful to be ignorant, even though that is the status quo of humanity (no one came into this world knowing).
What to do then?
Question EVERYTHING!
Investigate, compare, confront, listen to different points of view and draw your own conclusions, always using a logical approach at least—if we are not able to use a scientific approach.
But more important: be careful before adopting something as a fact, do not underestimate the power of misinformation because a lie told a hundred times becomes reality. You do not believe me? Look around you and see how some of the most ridiculous lies became the dogmatic foundations of most religions, and if you dare to question them, you might as well end up dead.
This is the power that a virus wields.
Even the smallest flu can turn the world upside down.
And that's not a guess.
That is a fact.
Is history.
M. Ch. Landa
