each of us has a particular worldview a
way of looking at the world a way of
deciding whether to believe a message to
reject it or take it with a grain of
salt that saying means that you are
regarding something with healthy
skepticism and it has an interesting
origin it relates to an antidote
described by a Roman philosopher about
2,000 years ago to a particular type of
poison among the antidotes ingredients
was a single grain of salt
the antidote had other ingredients too
though the lesson to take from this
common idiom is that skepticism will
protect your worldview from the
psychological poisons of indoctrination
and propaganda but just as the grain of
salt was only one ingredient of the
antidote you need more than just
skepticism road views determine what a
society and its members see as truth
often world views serve the interests of
powerful elites when those elites
marshal their power in ways that oppress
others the world views become
instruments of oppression at other times
world views can blind us to what a
scientific worldview would say is truth
like when Galileo was branded a heretic
for saying that the earth revolved
around the Sun which was a problem for
the dominant worldview at that time when
it comes to oppressive and superstitious
worldviews like these skepticism is
essential however skepticism doesn’t
help us to create helpful worldviews
skepticism helps us to see inaccuracies
but it doesn’t help us to unveil the
truth in addition to skepticism I
propose that you should add some lenses
to your psychological antidote to
indoctrination by lenses I mean ways of
viewing messages and ideas that help you
determine whether to believe them or
reject them in addition I propose that
one should add a certain flavor of
skepticism to one’s psychological
antidote making skepticism itself a lens
the lenses that I propose that you add
to your mental toolbox are coherence
criticality and connection the first
lens is coherence coherence is an
overall sense of agreement and harm
to cohere is to stick together when a
message has internal coherence its ideas
and parts fit with each other when a
message has external coherence the
message as a whole fits with the things
that you already know and believe about
the world examples of messages that lack
internal coherence are logical fallacies
like a message or argument that attacks
a strawman or an ad hominem attack when
a message or an idea isn’t logical one
should reject it outright deciding
whether to or how to evaluate the
external coherence of a message is more
difficult it’s more challenging in order
to evaluate the external coherence of a
message you need to have something to
compare it to this is where your own
worldview comes into play your worldview
is the collection of things that you
believe and the values that you have
worldviews are based on a foundation of
deeply held positions and assumptions
about the world many of which you don’t
know that there are alternatives and
others of which you aren’t even aware
that you have those beliefs and
assumptions worldviews include things
like what human nature is what the best
economic system is and where the earth
fits into the structure of the universe
in order to evaluate the external
coherence of messages you need to have a
fully articulated and coherent worldview
yourselves so you need to become
reflective about it you need to be
conscious about the elements of your own
worldview those after all it’s the
messages that you tell yourself about
the world when you’ve got yourself
settled on what your worldview is and
your reflective and conscious about it
then you can use it as a way of
comparing other messages to it to
determine your to determine their
external coherence one caution that I
would add at this point is that you
shouldn’t let your worldview become
rigid and brittle your worldview if it
becomes rigid and brittle could blind
you to the truth of externally coherent
and internally coherent messages that
might represent the next level in your
own worldview almost thirty years ago
when I was twenty I was a homophobe I
was an advocate for social justice in
relation to all other issues and I
evaluated messages to see whether they
were raised
or promote a depression of any kind and
if they did then I rejected them but at
the same time I was homophobic at my
university there was a group called gays
and lesbians on campus and they promoted
a day called blue jeans day on this day
if you were an advocate for equality for
gays and lesbians than you were meant to
wear blue jeans to school back in 1990
everybody wore blue jeans to school
every day the promotion of this event
created quite a stir I decided that they
weren’t going to dictate what I was
going to wear very us-versus-them
thinking something I normally rejected
but I was blind to it in this instance
so I decided that in spite of the event
I was going to wear blue jeans that day
when I got on the bus wearing my jeans
and felt the stares of everybody looking
at me wearing their one pair of khaki
pants that they dragged out from the
back of their closet ironic I became
what we now refer to as an ally years
before I had ever heard of that word
used outside of textbooks about World
War two the next lens that I recommend
using is criticality criticality is a
special type of critical thinking not
critical thinking about the logic of a
message since that’s captured in the
lens of coherence but criticality rooted
in an analysis of power and oppression
criticality asks who benefits
it doesn’t seek to just explain the
world but it seeks to critique and
change the world for the better
criticality looks at messages and social
structures and norms and when they
benefit one group at the expense of
another critical theory is well critical
of that critical theory is and
criticality is rooted in an aspiration
towards equality and social justice when
you apply the lens of criticality to
evaluating messages and ideas an idea
can be found wanting if it supports or
justifies or even allows for oppression
even if those ideas and messages are
logical and reasonable and internally
coherent throughout history many
narratives have been perfectly logical
and reasonable and internally coherent
but it’s
justified oppression and injustice with
their seemingly coherent and reasonable
narratives often by people who because
of their worldviews didn’t realize the
harmful nature of their actions when
they were acting according to those
harmful and oppressive narratives when
our leaders promote the worldview or the
narrative of economic growth and they
tell us a story that economic growth is
going to create jobs and opportunities
for everyone we need to interrogate this
claim can there possibly be infinite
economic growth on a finite planet at
the same time we need to look at the
story of economic growth and the impacts
of economic growth with an eye to trying
to seek out and analyze their
implications for a just world when we do
that when we examine the narrative of
economic growth it reveals the truth the
transnational corporations benefit from
the current conception of economic
growth while marginalized people in the
global south and ecosystems all over the
world suffer the consequences the final
and perhaps most important lens is that
of connection Buddhist monk and peace
activist technolon calls this lens
interbeing
to describe this lens or this concept of
interbeing he talked about how there is
a cloud in this piece of paper at first
it seemed silly or esoteric but when you
think about it he’s onto something
he explains that this piece of paper
came from a tree and the tree couldn’t
have grown without water and it wouldn’t
have got that water without rain from a
cloud and then thick non-han goes on to
explain that the logger who cut down the
tree is also in this piece of paper and
the wheat that went into the bread that
the logger ate and so on when you look
at things to see how they’re connected
how ideas and events are connected and
interrelated with one another you can
start to see what Martin Luther King jr.
calls the interrelated quality of
reality he talked about how you can’t
leave for work in the morning without
depending on more than
the world for the food that you ate for
breakfast to really evaluate whether to
believe a message to reject it to change
your way of thinking to allow it to fit
with that message or vice-versa to look
at the message in a different way so
that you can see it in a way that it is
coherent or consistent with your
aspirations for the world it’s helpful
to use the concept of interbeing looking
for the connections and the
relationships between events and ideas
helps you to see there more important
implications for the world using the
lens of connection as a framework for
the lenses of coherence and criticality
helps to you to make sure that you’re
the coherence of your worldview accounts
for the big picture and helps you to
make sure that your sense of social
justice stays expansive and inclusive
using each of these lenses clarifies a
different aspect of reality about
messages and ideas used in concert they
allow for understanding that is
rationale rooted in social justice and
consistent with the interrelated quality
of reality take climate change for an
example there are those that claim that
climate change is not a result of human
impacts on the environment those claims
lack coherence sometimes they lack
internal coherence since they represent
false reasoning but they always lack
external coherence since they are
inconsistent with a consensus of 97% of
climate scientists that climate change
is the result of human impacts on the
environment moreover the impacts of
climate change demand that we look at
climate change as a social justice issue
the lens of criticality insists that we
look at climate change to see what its
implications for a just world are we see
that climate change has implications for
people in the global south and for
marginalized communities and so
criticality demands that we acknowledge
and address climate change with a view
to minimizing the dangers of social and
political exploitation that are expected
to come in the wake of climate change
the lens of connection shows how
intertwined we all are on a global on a
warming planet and it shows how
this one issue of climate change is
interwoven with many other issues
ranging from economics to food scarcity
to wide-ranging political and military
implications deciding what messages to
believe about climate change demands a
truly global perspective it demands that
we consider how we are all connected on
this planet that we live on and how we
are all connected with each other on
Valentine’s Day in 1990 interestingly
just a couple of months before blue
jeans day at the University of Alberta
at the request of scientist Carl Sagan
the spacecraft Voyager 1 turned its
cameras back towards Earth and took a
picture from 6 billion kilometres away
in that picture called pale blue dot the
earth takes up less than a pixel and it
shows how small the earth is compared to
the vastness of space of this photograph
Carl Sagan said it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly and
compassionately with one another and to
preserve and cherish the pale blue dot
the only home we’ve ever known to me
that sentiment is an ideal ingredient to
add to that grain of salt in your
antidote that you’re going to use to
decide what to believe and what to take as truth thank you
way of looking at the world a way of
deciding whether to believe a message to
reject it or take it with a grain of
salt that saying means that you are
regarding something with healthy
skepticism and it has an interesting
origin it relates to an antidote
described by a Roman philosopher about
2,000 years ago to a particular type of
poison among the antidotes ingredients
was a single grain of salt
the antidote had other ingredients too
though the lesson to take from this
common idiom is that skepticism will
protect your worldview from the
psychological poisons of indoctrination
and propaganda but just as the grain of
salt was only one ingredient of the
antidote you need more than just
skepticism road views determine what a
society and its members see as truth
often world views serve the interests of
powerful elites when those elites
marshal their power in ways that oppress
others the world views become
instruments of oppression at other times
world views can blind us to what a
scientific worldview would say is truth
like when Galileo was branded a heretic
for saying that the earth revolved
around the Sun which was a problem for
the dominant worldview at that time when
it comes to oppressive and superstitious
worldviews like these skepticism is
essential however skepticism doesn’t
help us to create helpful worldviews
skepticism helps us to see inaccuracies
but it doesn’t help us to unveil the
truth in addition to skepticism I
propose that you should add some lenses
to your psychological antidote to
indoctrination by lenses I mean ways of
viewing messages and ideas that help you
determine whether to believe them or
reject them in addition I propose that
one should add a certain flavor of
skepticism to one’s psychological
antidote making skepticism itself a lens
the lenses that I propose that you add
to your mental toolbox are coherence
criticality and connection the first
lens is coherence coherence is an
overall sense of agreement and harm
to cohere is to stick together when a
message has internal coherence its ideas
and parts fit with each other when a
message has external coherence the
message as a whole fits with the things
that you already know and believe about
the world examples of messages that lack
internal coherence are logical fallacies
like a message or argument that attacks
a strawman or an ad hominem attack when
a message or an idea isn’t logical one
should reject it outright deciding
whether to or how to evaluate the
external coherence of a message is more
difficult it’s more challenging in order
to evaluate the external coherence of a
message you need to have something to
compare it to this is where your own
worldview comes into play your worldview
is the collection of things that you
believe and the values that you have
worldviews are based on a foundation of
deeply held positions and assumptions
about the world many of which you don’t
know that there are alternatives and
others of which you aren’t even aware
that you have those beliefs and
assumptions worldviews include things
like what human nature is what the best
economic system is and where the earth
fits into the structure of the universe
in order to evaluate the external
coherence of messages you need to have a
fully articulated and coherent worldview
yourselves so you need to become
reflective about it you need to be
conscious about the elements of your own
worldview those after all it’s the
messages that you tell yourself about
the world when you’ve got yourself
settled on what your worldview is and
your reflective and conscious about it
then you can use it as a way of
comparing other messages to it to
determine your to determine their
external coherence one caution that I
would add at this point is that you
shouldn’t let your worldview become
rigid and brittle your worldview if it
becomes rigid and brittle could blind
you to the truth of externally coherent
and internally coherent messages that
might represent the next level in your
own worldview almost thirty years ago
when I was twenty I was a homophobe I
was an advocate for social justice in
relation to all other issues and I
evaluated messages to see whether they
were raised
or promote a depression of any kind and
if they did then I rejected them but at
the same time I was homophobic at my
university there was a group called gays
and lesbians on campus and they promoted
a day called blue jeans day on this day
if you were an advocate for equality for
gays and lesbians than you were meant to
wear blue jeans to school back in 1990
everybody wore blue jeans to school
every day the promotion of this event
created quite a stir I decided that they
weren’t going to dictate what I was
going to wear very us-versus-them
thinking something I normally rejected
but I was blind to it in this instance
so I decided that in spite of the event
I was going to wear blue jeans that day
when I got on the bus wearing my jeans
and felt the stares of everybody looking
at me wearing their one pair of khaki
pants that they dragged out from the
back of their closet ironic I became
what we now refer to as an ally years
before I had ever heard of that word
used outside of textbooks about World
War two the next lens that I recommend
using is criticality criticality is a
special type of critical thinking not
critical thinking about the logic of a
message since that’s captured in the
lens of coherence but criticality rooted
in an analysis of power and oppression
criticality asks who benefits
it doesn’t seek to just explain the
world but it seeks to critique and
change the world for the better
criticality looks at messages and social
structures and norms and when they
benefit one group at the expense of
another critical theory is well critical
of that critical theory is and
criticality is rooted in an aspiration
towards equality and social justice when
you apply the lens of criticality to
evaluating messages and ideas an idea
can be found wanting if it supports or
justifies or even allows for oppression
even if those ideas and messages are
logical and reasonable and internally
coherent throughout history many
narratives have been perfectly logical
and reasonable and internally coherent
but it’s
justified oppression and injustice with
their seemingly coherent and reasonable
narratives often by people who because
of their worldviews didn’t realize the
harmful nature of their actions when
they were acting according to those
harmful and oppressive narratives when
our leaders promote the worldview or the
narrative of economic growth and they
tell us a story that economic growth is
going to create jobs and opportunities
for everyone we need to interrogate this
claim can there possibly be infinite
economic growth on a finite planet at
the same time we need to look at the
story of economic growth and the impacts
of economic growth with an eye to trying
to seek out and analyze their
implications for a just world when we do
that when we examine the narrative of
economic growth it reveals the truth the
transnational corporations benefit from
the current conception of economic
growth while marginalized people in the
global south and ecosystems all over the
world suffer the consequences the final
and perhaps most important lens is that
of connection Buddhist monk and peace
activist technolon calls this lens
interbeing
to describe this lens or this concept of
interbeing he talked about how there is
a cloud in this piece of paper at first
it seemed silly or esoteric but when you
think about it he’s onto something
he explains that this piece of paper
came from a tree and the tree couldn’t
have grown without water and it wouldn’t
have got that water without rain from a
cloud and then thick non-han goes on to
explain that the logger who cut down the
tree is also in this piece of paper and
the wheat that went into the bread that
the logger ate and so on when you look
at things to see how they’re connected
how ideas and events are connected and
interrelated with one another you can
start to see what Martin Luther King jr.
calls the interrelated quality of
reality he talked about how you can’t
leave for work in the morning without
depending on more than
the world for the food that you ate for
breakfast to really evaluate whether to
believe a message to reject it to change
your way of thinking to allow it to fit
with that message or vice-versa to look
at the message in a different way so
that you can see it in a way that it is
coherent or consistent with your
aspirations for the world it’s helpful
to use the concept of interbeing looking
for the connections and the
relationships between events and ideas
helps you to see there more important
implications for the world using the
lens of connection as a framework for
the lenses of coherence and criticality
helps to you to make sure that you’re
the coherence of your worldview accounts
for the big picture and helps you to
make sure that your sense of social
justice stays expansive and inclusive
using each of these lenses clarifies a
different aspect of reality about
messages and ideas used in concert they
allow for understanding that is
rationale rooted in social justice and
consistent with the interrelated quality
of reality take climate change for an
example there are those that claim that
climate change is not a result of human
impacts on the environment those claims
lack coherence sometimes they lack
internal coherence since they represent
false reasoning but they always lack
external coherence since they are
inconsistent with a consensus of 97% of
climate scientists that climate change
is the result of human impacts on the
environment moreover the impacts of
climate change demand that we look at
climate change as a social justice issue
the lens of criticality insists that we
look at climate change to see what its
implications for a just world are we see
that climate change has implications for
people in the global south and for
marginalized communities and so
criticality demands that we acknowledge
and address climate change with a view
to minimizing the dangers of social and
political exploitation that are expected
to come in the wake of climate change
the lens of connection shows how
intertwined we all are on a global on a
warming planet and it shows how
this one issue of climate change is
interwoven with many other issues
ranging from economics to food scarcity
to wide-ranging political and military
implications deciding what messages to
believe about climate change demands a
truly global perspective it demands that
we consider how we are all connected on
this planet that we live on and how we
are all connected with each other on
Valentine’s Day in 1990 interestingly
just a couple of months before blue
jeans day at the University of Alberta
at the request of scientist Carl Sagan
the spacecraft Voyager 1 turned its
cameras back towards Earth and took a
picture from 6 billion kilometres away
in that picture called pale blue dot the
earth takes up less than a pixel and it
shows how small the earth is compared to
the vastness of space of this photograph
Carl Sagan said it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly and
compassionately with one another and to
preserve and cherish the pale blue dot
the only home we’ve ever known to me
that sentiment is an ideal ingredient to
add to that grain of salt in your
antidote that you’re going to use to
decide what to believe and what to take as truth thank you
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