Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, the former United States Senator from New York, United States
Ambassador and Harvard academic has said: “Everyone is entitled to his own
opinion, but not to his own facts.”
Everyone can
believe what they want to believe in life. You can believe that America is
always right, that God literally created the world in six days, that whites are
superior to people of color, that we can say anything we want because we are
protected by the First Amendment. Trump has unabashedly asserted, “I know more
than the generals, I am the only one who can fix the economy, that I have the
world’s greatest memory, that nobody respects women more than I do, that
climate change is a hoax that was created by China and, that I speak the truth
and everybody else speaks fake news.” Such utterances by Trump are cut from the
fabric of his fantasy world.
The world we live
in, today, is either governed by such fantasy, fake news or fact. Literally, this is the political world we
face on a daily basis and with each Trump tweet.
Today we seemingly
have more people living in their own world of opinions and conspiracy theories
than ever before. Facts are equated with opinions as carrying the same weight
of reality. With today’s Internet, a
particular position can be trumpeted over and over by a single person or one
group or another.
Russia
successfully used fake news to influence American voters through the use of
various media platforms during the 2016 Presidential Election. Some would claim
that such behavior, on the part of Russia, was a declaration of cyber war on
the United States. There are those who
would assert that the results of that election were compromised and should not
be considered valid. Some would say, as
a result, that Trump is an illegitimate office holder. So here we are.
People often times
have a need for things to be a certain way in order for them to feel secure. These folks adopt dogmatic
positions to protect themselves from things that cause them to feel afraid.
Eckhart Tolle has written “Dogmas…religious, political, scientific…arise out of
the erroneous belief that thoughts can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual
prisons. And the strange thing is that
people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‘I know.’
Nothing has
inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner
or later, because reality will disclose its falseness, unless the basic
delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.”
The problem
becomes, as we evolve into a more interdependent American society and members
of the world community, we require facts, the truth and the security that comes
from living in the real world. Without such a basis in reality, everything
becomes a play on the unreal. What can we believe, what can we plan for, what
can we anticipate will be the consequences for our actions? Our very survival
as a society depends on our ability to make such distinctions.
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