I am increasingly concerned about our culture wars (struggle between two or more sets of conflicting cultural values) as a cause of government gridlock, religious squabbles, and a declining American culture. I have been reading and researching the topic and thinking about how to “preach it”.

One thing I have learned is that we all mistake our “opinions” as “fact”, and we decide that our “beliefs” are the “right ones”. Once we create opinion/facts  we close our minds and remain rigid and unable to compromise. Gridlock. Hate. Intolerance. Culture wars.

I read something interesting this afternoon about the process of creating facts from opinions. The writer calls this “truthiness” Here is a blurb from the article posted at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books,” Colbert said in 2005. The word became a lexical prize jewel for Frank Rich, who alluded to it in multiple columns, including one in which he accused John McCain’s 2008 campaign of trying to “envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness.” Scientists who study the phenomenon now also use the term. It humorously captures how, as cognitive psychologist Eryn Newman put it, “smart, sophisticated people” can go awry on questions of fact.

Newman, who works out of the University of California–Irvine, recently uncovered an unsettling precondition for truthiness: The less effort it takes to process a factual claim, the more accurate it seems. When we fluidly and frictionlessly absorb a piece of information, one that perhaps snaps neatly onto our existing belief structures, we are filled with a sense of comfort, familiarity, and trust. The information strikes us as credible, and we are more likely to affirm it—whether or not it is really fact.

If we truly want things to change for the better, we need to avoid developing our own truthiness. We need to listen, consider, read, decide based on facts. Truthiness is a disease, a blight that tarnishes western civilization. I really think we have been culturally trained to be quiet, spend lots of money, live in denial of assorted realities, avoid thinking too much, and trash anyone who does not believe as we do. Automatons.

Sure, we have the right to believe what we want. However, I would like the leave the world a better place than I found it. A Pox on Truthiness! A return to thinking!