Critical thinking – or perhaps the significant absence of it in a world that has been taken over by a constant barrage of data from information technology, is a skill for life that could easily have stopped us all from reaching the point the U.K. is now at – had we all been using it and continued to use it throughout our adult lives.
Yes, the simple act of asking questions about anything and everything that you don’t already know or genuinely trust to be true, instead of trusting any source that doesn’t actually have direct human interaction involved, has become a critical contributor to every problem that the Country has.
Pretty much none of us have been policing the opportunity to make decisions about our lives and the people who affect them which now come at us in a near ceaseless flow.
This isn’t to say or suggest that we aren’t using filters of our own. Indeed many of us are.
But the filters we use are created, shaped and modified based upon whatever it is that we at any particular moment believe.
It is these beliefs themselves, which are too often formed by the conclusions we make about the data we consume. Data that we rarely seem to bother checking, especially when it has come from a remote source that we have only found reason to agree with or like.
Coming to the place where we can understand or comprehend just how much power we genuinely have in everything we do, based upon the decision or choice to consider everything we are told, differently, to how we have done or currently do so, is no little thing.
What is more, the fact that so many of us already believe that we are thinking differently, when it is only our filters that have actually changed, means that the ‘awakening’ that so many believe to be now underway, is likely to be nothing of the sort. Just a different pathway that’s going to lead to much more of the same chaos, perhaps even more quickly than what we have already experienced before.
Acting on fear usually makes the outcome we fear more likely
Whilst the world runs upon fear at levels which some will spend entire lifetimes without feeling the need to contemplate, the irrationality of fear mongering through electronic and remote mediums that we fail to question, is disproportionate to what we would walk away with if the same stories could only come from sources or rather people that we interact with in our day to day lives.
People and news orgs with platforms, numbers of followers, subscribers and likes that give them the benefit of remote credibility are sensationalising everything more now than ever before, just to generate clicks that will lead to those numbers continually going up, when those numbers are what most of us look for when we make a cursory decision that lets us ‘know’ the source is something we can trust.
So when we willingly believe the sources online and unquestionably trust the information coming to us from whichever direction we have lowered our drawbridge, and then the only message that comes at us is one that promotes desperation and fear, we are all becoming increasingly susceptible to the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because we are responding to a problem or level of problems that don’t actually exist.
The absence of real Leadership
People and public figures that we might previously have been able to trust are themselves very afraid and in many cases have no idea how to act.
This means that otherwise non-existent realities that those battling their own fears, following their own agendas and those of the platforms that share them, are spreading compelling narratives without any real understanding or cognisance of the implications or likely consequences of what they are doing, and what the fear that wouldn’t exist without them, is well on the way to delivering.
This is not to say that the UK isn’t in a very difficult place. Because it is.
But it is also vitally important to recognise that the UK is currently sat within a very dangerous situation that is getting progressively worse and will continue to do so, until we have leaders or lead ourselves through change which rejects the key pillars and shibboleths of this highly destructive status quo.
The Law of Unexpected Consequences is currently running everything
We are at a crossroads or fork where choices that we are making or refusing to make could end up taking us all towards outcomes that are poles apart.
The fear that all streams of media are now generating is causing many to want to run away. And when we are running – or thinking in that way, it means that we are indulging irrational fears, rather than questioning them or more importantly the validity of whatever is triggering them.
When we are running and hiding, we are not thinking, and we can and will only contribute to the growing mess.
Indeed, we may be about to condemn ourselves to unnecessarily experiencing a very dark place with implications for our own future – just because we took at face value whatever took us there in the first place.
It’s time to be objective
There is a very broad context to consider. However, the breadth is necessary because so many of us who see the world differently, believe different things and apply that understanding with very different filters.
We are all contributing to the growing mess that is building throughout all parts of society. Because we all believe that the positions that we currently have on everything are exclusively right.
Today, the left blames everything on the right and the right blames everything on the left in what seems like an endless focus on amplifying everything that’s either not-normal, or is massively wrong.
Meanwhile, there is not even the merest hint of acknowledging the real causes of all the problems, and certainly no time for leaders to actually try leading and begin suggesting what needs to change – no matter how hard it may be – so that we can all begin to experience a world where everything is going right for everyone and not just the few.
This is now a 360-degree problem
The political and therefore the leadership problem we are facing is that the alternatives to everything and everyone in politics that are already accepted as wrong are not alternatives at all.
We are literally plagued in every direction by False Prophets using fear to push everyone who isn’t questioning everything they say, and why they are saying it, towards their cause. No matter how similar and potentially worse than what we are already experiencing it might be.
To be clear, nothing is as it seems right now. This is an equation that works ALL ways.
Some problems, like the economic picture, the state of our political system and the motivations and influences on power are considerably worse than we might like to believe.
Whereas the realities that underpin so many of the things that we are fearful of are not anyway near as threatening as they appear.
They will only become so, if the responsibility for dealing with them is left either in the hands of those who are controlling them today, or under those who protest that they and only they have the solutions that will sort them all out – all too often presented with a very simplistic and therefore unexplained view of what they would actually do.
For as long as people refuse to take back the power they actually have, a very discombobulated reality we must also face is that any of the leaders and political parties that we currently have, could change direction and begin to do what’s genuinely good and right for all of us, at any time.
However, as time and opportunity has demonstrated time and again, they will not.
Until we accept responsibility and become accountable, we will be damned by every outcome
The uncomfortable truth that few will face up to is that the wrong choice and making the wrong choice, because it’s the only choice, is still the wrong choice – even when it may seem to be better than what we have to choose from or than whatever we have experienced before.
All of the political parties that we can choose from are completely under the sway and direction of establishment power and views, and will inevitably maintain the status quo, which is on a trajectory that can only see everything getting worse.
It will not take anyone who chooses to employ their own skill of critical thinking and the analysis that soon accompanies it to see that once the realities that accompany the rhetoric have been investigated, there is really very little to detect any difference between the motives and directions of all of our elected politicians or those who wish to be elected that will differentiate them to the degree that they are capable of delivering outcomes that are so markedly different that we will be able to tell them apart.
Yet there isn’t any problem the UK faces that cannot genuinely be solved, if there is the will and capability of leadership to do all that will be necessary to address the problems at their root or cause.
Unfortunately, instead of leaders, we have an entire political class filled with glory seeking middle managers who believe that success is measured only through the possession of power.
Adam Tugwell 
4 thoughts on “Playing on Fears: The self-fulfilling prophecies of today’s False Prophets will be the worst outcome from everything that’s already wrong”