The Opinion of the Intelligent
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
—Philip K. Dick
"My view is what it is because maybe it's of my experiences..."
All forms of truths should be heard. Whether they're based on fact or personal experience. No one is better or worse."
"Your facts don't change my opinion."
In 2015, MTV released an hour-long documentary called White People. Before you quickly dismiss it as yet another examination of... er... white people [shrug], take a look. It's worth the time. The gist is simple: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas approaches young white people from a different angle than the shaming attacks that seem fairly standard. He really asks hard questions and seems to be trying to understand their bias before presenting facts to them. In other words, he approaches young white people in exactly the way the social justice and identity politics folks want the whites to approach them. With empathy and curiosity.
One young woman, after being interviewed briefly, admits that she feels discriminated against because POC get all the college scholarships. It's an argument we've heard before from those who feel affirmative action has gone too far. Instead of rolling his eyes or looking at her like she's a fucking idiot, Vargas listens. He asks questions. Then he goes and gets the facts; whites are 40 percent more likely to receive scholarships than POC. He gently presents the facts and her reaction is that of a near refusal to believe because her anecdotal experience informs her differently. It is that dissonance between her personal experience and the objective truth that conflicts her. But facts is facts, my friends. After some discomfort, she admits that perhaps she is wrong.
When I was a public school teacher I had a quote at the top of my wall:
"The opinion of the intelligent outweighs the certainty of the ignorant."
Opinions are your truth. While your truth is great on an emotional level, if it butts heads with reality, it behooves you to look hard at reality and admit that your truth is wrong. We hate admitting when we're wrong so the first course of action is to simply dismiss the facts as manipulated or false. Sometimes the facts have been manipulated so you need to dig deeper.
Some will argue that there are facts and there opinions and that they are distinct. Not true. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of scientists have demonstrated that climate change is predominantly man-made and it is my opinion (given I am not a scientist) that they are correct. On top of that, once my opinion was formed, I did some reading of my own on the effects of man on the climate which merely solidified my opinion. I even read the pseudo-science that countered this belief and found both the funding sources and the qualifications of these Big Oil purchased scientists to be untrustworthy.
Back in the halcyon days of March 2020, I truly believed that COVID was no worse than the flu. Chicken Little screaming about another acorn smacking him on his noggin. That was my truth. I didn't have it, it only seemed to affect old people, fat people, or old fat people, so what did I have to fear? Then I read about it from the scientists who are expert in this sort of thing. I watched some conspiracy theorist YouTubes. I looked at the numbers and much like climate science, the vast majority of scientific opinion indicated this pandemic was some serious shit. I was wrong. I took the suggested precautions.
Does this admission mean that all of the information distributed by the CDC is accurate or that all the government mandates are effective? What are you, a fourth grader? Each piece requires some research and triangulation. Also note that in order to fully triangulate, you can't go to FOX News, Breitbart, and Dave Rubin and claim three different perspectives.
In late May of the same year, George Floyd was murdered on camera and the horror of watching a police officer kneel on his neck until he died was a devastation across the world. The rhetorical flourish that followed was that the police in America were wantonly killing black Americans like racist locusts eating fields of corn. An epidemic of police killing unarmed black men was right there under our noses. Again, my belief was certain this was true. Back to the data. According to the Washington Post’s database of police shootings, shootings of unarmed black citizens are rare. There were eighteen in 2020 and only four as of the last week in 2021. The odds of an unarmed black adult being killed by a police officer in 2019 were about in one in 1.7 million, similar to the chances of being struck by lightning, and lower than the chances of winning $50,000 in Powerball.
Does this mean racism is a thing of the pasty or that policing in this country isn't more brutal toward people of color in general? What are you, slowly emptying your drool cup and scratching your ass in a Walmart?
When your truth butts heads with facts, your truth isn't the truth, gang.
And that's where we come to triangulation.
Three is a powerful number.
This is on you and you alone. If you allow yourself to be fooled over and over again you can't blame the grifters, can you?
Back to the woman in White People. Her feelings and personal experience told her she was being discriminated against because she was white. Vargas presented her with factual info that contradicted her personal experience. Then he asked her friend—a minority—what his experience was and he confirmed that, as a minority of several ethnicities, he couldn't get a scholarship, either. Three points of contact. Two will almost always align. The truth is revealed.
Here's the thing: your personal truth informs your reactions to the world. According to the documentary, most white people live among white people and have little in person contact with people of color. Their personal truth is informed with a huge deficit of information. What information they receive concerning black and brown humans comes from television and the movies. Does it surprise you these people are terrified of young black men and women? If your personal truth is only informed by your experiences in the world, without some attempt to triangulate and educate yourself, it is by the very definition, "the certainty of the ignorant."
This formula applies to people of color as well as whites, to atheists as well as religious types, to those in the North as well as those in the South, to women as well as men.
Lately there has been an awful lot of moaning about the increase in disinformation being spread by social media, by the two extremist factions of ideology, by your fucking senior citizen father-in-law who truly believes the moon landing was directed by Kubrick and Hillary Clinton likes a bit of char-broiled toddler on her salads. If you're fooled by disinformation, that's on you, brother. This is a capitalist system and everyone from Robin DiAngelo to Joe Rogan are just trying to peel those greenbacks out of your mealy, sweaty hands.
You know how much lying and exaggerating is going on so it is up to you to sift through the bullshit to find actionable info. You know that while the accusation that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians is suspect information, there is no doubt that Russian hackers manipulated social media to fuck with the 2016 election. That's on you for not looking more deeply into that enraging bullshit you shared on Faceborg. Counting on private industry to regulate themselves is a pipe dream and hoping the government will step in is nonsense. This is on you and you alone. If you allow yourself to be fooled over and over again you can't blame the grifters, can you?
The concept of triangulation is borrowed from navigational and land surveying techniques that determine a single point in space with the convergence of measurements taken from two other distinct points. In Research Methods in Education, Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion, and Keith Morrison tell us that "triangulation is an attempt to map out, or explain more fully, the richness and complexity of human behavior by studying it from more than one standpoint."
Expanding the idea to the myriad points of information spewed out into the vast ocean of the internet, triangulation is employed when you read something that claims certainty and expects societal response based upon that certainty.
Three points of information. A fuller perspective. The opinion of the intelligent.
The Truth is a complicated thing and anyone claiming that their truth is more valid than another's without factual information and another take on it is highly likely full of shit. Without some outside perspective, some research, some fucking education on their certainty, their perspective represents a truth but only a tiny one. One in 7 billion, in fact.
Those are pretty scant odds of being the Truth.
