Change is never permanent

He knows that changes are not permanent, but change is. Tom Sawyer by Rush.

The only true prediction is that shits gonna change. How is where things get murky.

The book I was reading (The Rational Optimist) was published in 2010. The author kept bringing up climatechangeglobalwarmingnexticeage hoopla throughout it, but towards the end showed how it didn’t really make a dent in his perspective. What struck me was how quickly thoughts have shifted from one paradigm to another in such a short span of time.

Yeah, I’m a global warming/climate change denier, and proud of it. But thats not the point here, its about how shifty ‘collective thought ‘ is. More so since the advent of the internet. Even more so since the near ubiquitous use of smartphones.

This is also in no small part due to news sources, the above items are only vehicles. It shows me that programming is even easier once you put the source closer to the person. The flip side of the programming is that having the source closer to the person also allows for them to have counter-programming available.

But not always.

One example I’ve personally seen is in a friend of mine. No net, no TV, no smartphone (oh yes, this is a real person, I’m not making this up.) Whose only news source is NPR. You can probably imagine how specific his opinions on world events are since he does not recieve any counter-viewpoints through ‘reliable sources’: my points don’t count because he knows me. Its funny how that works; he accepts as word of god, the opinions from people he has never, will never meet, over someone he sees everyday and works with and knows.

“Why would they lie?” He’ll ask. “People would call ’em out if they were lying”. To which point I say “people do call ’em iu, but you don’t hear that because you don’t see/hear/read those sources.” Its not 100%, but more information access should help a person form better opinions.

Not.

Most people don’t want to think for themselves and the newsie types and their controllers are well aware of that fact.

Another item I have heard frequently is how there is a growing concern that a majority of people have zero savings and live paycheck to paycheck. They talk about it but never offer any solutions. What burns me about is ‘the problem’, as they put it isn’t a problem, but a symptom. I was there where they are talking just a couple of months ago. Zero savings, one check away from catastrophe. The problem, as I see it, is education or lack thereof. I didn’t understand how fluid money is and the reason for that was I had been taught wrong. Those questions I had made me learn. Maybe too late in life to leverage them properly, but I am seeing improvements now. I have money set aside, and its not hurting my day to day.

That just goes to show, that even with a plethora of information available, its not the information, but questions that matter. If you arent asking the right questions, the answers don’t mean anything.

So how do you know what questions to ask? That’s the real trick. My answer is ‘just keep questioning everything!’. Don’t settle until your answers answer themselves. No one can ‘know it all’, that prospect is just way too big, but a body can know enough, if what they know answers the questions of their days. I despise specialization, but it does have its merits in many cases. The main reason I despise it is in scope: a specialist has a narrow scope on the world and there are times when a broader scope will provide solutions unable to be seen by said specialist. Points of Merit: a Doctor specializing in Cancer Research. Points of Failure: a Poitical Scientist specializing in Socialism. One of those benefits humanity, the other is a parasite.

Advertisement