Sometimes you get in an unnatural hurry. Granted, there are times when you need to hurry: The pan on the stovetop is smoking; the dog is chasing a squirrel and dragging her leash, or you forgot that today is your anniversary. Hurry is the appropriate response to these situations and many others, but so much of today’s hurry, in my opinion, is unnatural to a contented human being.
We could argue whether contentment has ever been characteristic of humans, but I think we would all agree that there is less of it now than in days gone by, and that contentment is, in fact, rare as hen’s teeth.
We’ve seen it coming for a long time. The beloved Andy Griffith Show episode, “Man in a Hurry” first aired in 1960. My grandfather, born in 1886, was old before I hatched and wise beyond any wisdom I might hope to attain. He would caution people to stop “going at it like you’re fighting fire.” The word to the wise suggested pacing ourselves in order to work longer and for better results.
I’ve never forgotten his words, but there have been plenty of reminders to heed them. The carburetor installed backwards on the mower, the pecan sapling I mangled with the trimmer (thankfully it recovered), the face cream on the toothbrush; these were all effective prompts.
Last week I was in an unnatural hurry when I abandoned you with the unanswered question, “What hope do we have?” when a book written for the masses 85 years ago is beyond the understanding of all but the most advanced students today. A partial answer is in the act of hurrying itself.
I submit to you that while the average citizen today is less literate and less adept at math (history, science, civics) than our forbears, we are still endowed with the basic tools of discernment possessed by any rational person – if we take the time to use them.
The success of either a manipulative marketing campaign or a manipulative government depends heavily on getting us to hurry past rationality and discernment. We scan the headlines and accept them at face value. When the same headlines appear, word for word, from multiple sources, we accept that as validation rather than question it as a sign of manipulation. We are skeptical creatures, but only of information that runs contrary to our cognitive bias.
However, though we may not be trained in syllogistic reasoning, when we hear, “More doctors prefer Camel than any other cigarette,” we sense that something is not quite right.
When we become aware that most of the information now published and consumed passes through partisan lenses on both ends of the exchange, if the information is important to us, we can slow down long enough to dig a little deeper.
And that’s the catch. Separating fact from interpretation takes time and effort, and we are conditioned by instant gratification to avoid them both. So here’s an experiment which I submit may begin to help us break free of the conditioned response:
Grit your teeth and browse or channel surf over to Fox News. Take note of the choice of headlines. Then hold your nose and do the same at MSNBC. I think you will find that it’s as if the publishers lived on two different planets, their versions of reality being so different and often diametrically opposed. Then the lightbulb may go off, be it a good old illegal incandescent bulb or an LED: Either the truth is somewhere between those two versions of reality, or it does not exist in either version.
You may then consider that it’s worth the effort to look elsewhere, or you may decide that the question is not essential to the contentment you seek. The issue may, in fact, be designed to keep you from that contentment, designed to create a fear or an anger, generate a need that will keep you coming back for more of the same.
Alternately, you may find that you are already possessed of sufficient mathematical proficiency to debunk many of the claims that politics makes. Politics may tell you that the economy is good, that things are improving for the “average” person, which means that for half of your neighbors or more, things are not getting better, and your hamburger still costs twelve bucks.
In conclusion, discerning truth today is largely a matter of slowing down long enough to apprehend it. “Relax,” I tell Tracey, my beautiful and energetic modern woman. “I am relaxing!” She says. “Relax harder and faster, then!”
Outside The Box 