Rejecting Collective Fiction

It isn't so important for an idea to be true, as it is better for it to be accepted.  Maybe not better, but surely authorized.  The idea might not even be competent, but only needs a collection of believers.  It seems as though people appreciate a popular idea more than they work to critically think through a radical one.  When you apply this to our most important strategies like healthcare, climate change, gun control,  multicultural lifestyle, nutrition, economics, or legislation this deceptive governing appears to reveal itself.

There doesn't appear to be an algorithm for emotional truth that excludes reasonable or unreasonable doubt.  This is propagandistic.  I look at the polarization especially around faith, heritage, or patriotism.  These are great examples of creating fiction that cannot be proven true or untrue, tending to thrive only in human emotion, feeding off of our primal needs to belong.  It seems like it is enough to think a collective fiction true.  When all else fails, God can validate these weakly factual perceptions.  Our modern religious leaders appear to give this Divine authority, making anything challenging or counter popular believable through faith.  This convinces me that there can be a toxic morality.  This is worrisome.  It seem possible that faith can make anything true, even perceiving injustice as Divine will.  We see it consistently in war, industry, and economics.  For the bible tells me so.  Maybe it might be more fitting to say, "For my interpretation suggest so".

I say that with sensitivity my own necessity for faith.  I observe how living in a 2nd world city, part of  a first world nation, I see people unwilling or incapable of discovering the principles of complex systems in favor of gorging on dogma and hear say.  It is challenging, inconvenient, or boring to unwrap the entangled business processes that have encroached on civic responsibility.  It shows me that people appear unwilling to analyze, evaluate, or investigate.  Is this a problem?

I think for the first half of my life it was something I made a problem.  I perceived myself on the suffering end of the upper crust's truths.  My social perceptions showed me a world that was unfair to mine and I needed to correct this.  I needed to destroy racism.  I needed to empower the poor while awakening the rich.  I needed more people to look out for my race, my gente, my well being, and my interests.  This is where truth and fairness collided because the race battle was trying to play itself off as a species battle.  I was fixing a problem that was a collective fiction.

The powerful created an obstacle course of injustice to provide distractions for me get caught up in.  I realize there is no race war with those who see race as a collective fiction.  There is no gun-control for those who know death has many tools and will find more.  There is an abundance of health care in nature and in harmonious attitudes.  There isn't a financial crisis for those who truly believe in only needing "our daily bread" and a warm place to rest.  There isn't a need to advocate for God for those who have faith that God is expansive enough to be interpreted through many mythologies.

Now I accept that the power hungry only need to make believers out of enough.  Possibly because they need conflict, disagreement, fanaticism, fundamentalism, or bipartisan-ism in order to have an audience willing to entertain a collective fiction.   This makes room for people to believe what they want to believe.  The truth is in the eye of the beholder, right?  As long as they can teeter the totter with enough of their truth, then doubt can keep authority in their realm.  But if they suddenly become wrong then it might mean so is their power.  Observing this dynamic helps me no longer see injustice as intense of a struggle.  It has grown more as an observation.  The observation that winning is not an indicator of truth as it is a confirmation of belief.

Truth is not a moral trait, and being honest isn't either.  Truth may better be described as a convenient condition when reflection the human condition.  When I have some form of the truth, it feeds my feeling of being genuine, providing a condition that encourages my generosity, morality, and worth.  When I am wrong, it is unpleasing.  I feel ignored or marginalized. If I own little truth, I don't feel prone to accepting the truths of others.  I think this makes sense that my scarcity of truth will feed my attitudes that inflame my inadequacies.  Maybe now I need to create my truth until I can be pleasured again.  I think this is where the short sided pleasure seeking becomes a characteristic afforded 1st world cultures.  My need for pleasure from being powerfully truthful becomes an exponential condition that I have not learned to go without and can be led to be propagandic in order to be convincing.  Seeing this in my government and communities, I must recognize it in my self.  I am trying to hold on to truth despite being pressured by doubting and pleasure seeking to avoid participation in a collective fiction.

The moral trait I aspire to harden might be better labeled Accurate.  As I criticize the idea of collective fiction and toxic morality, I stand firm that faith is necessary.  The discernment process is not something I was taught thoroughly, the scientific method was my best chance, but I long for a culture that teaches me to vet the pleasurable with enough wisdom to find an accurate utility.