Vision

All too often the truth is often secondary to what people want to hear and what they want to enjoy getting worked up about, whether it's in a sexual or righteous way. Information finds its level and its target.

Yoz Grahame. Comment on "Banning blogging, 'Toothing, and Yoz." Many2Many, 5 April 2005

Back in the day when Windows still had screensavers, I started collecting quotes to use in mine. The above was one of them. A little more than twenty years later, it still feels relevant. Mainly, I suspect, because it's actually a fairly timeless observation.

This strikes me as one of those things that people believe about one another. In the post that Mr. Grahame was commenting on, one of the primary points concerned fact-checking, and the fact that many people tend to pursue it vigorously when presented with information that they disagree with (and thus, want to see falsified), and pass on it when something aligns with their tastes, interests or prejudices. But Clay Shirky, who authored the post wasn't just speaking about "people," he was also speaking about his readers, and calling them to task for being willing to believe things they really should have second guessed.

When I read Mr. Grahame's quote, I replace "people" and "they" with "I," and ask myself: What do I want to hear? What do I want to enjoy getting worked up about? What may be both the upside and the downside of this blog is that it's nearly two decades of pointers to precisely those things. I want to hear that the world is complicated place, and simple-sounding solutions are doomed to failure, if not making things worse than they were when they started. I'm too old, I suspect, to enjoy becoming worked up about anything these days, but I will argue that the United States is a fractured collection of mutually hostile (yet well-meaning) groups to anyone who will listen.

In other words, were it up to me, I would have it all figured out. Just like everyone else. Because it makes me feel perceptive and intelligent. But in reality, I am likely neither of those things, at least, not any more so than anyone else. Otherwise, I'd be better at predicting the future than I am, and would be comfortably retired by now, what with all of the money I would have made on the stock market and selling my best-selling book(s).

In the end, I know that I don't know. The world is, in my understanding, a very complicated place, and I can only see the small part of it that unfolds directly around me. Everything else, I take on trust in one source or another. And that tends to lead to very distorted views of things.