The Elevation of Personal Beliefs Above Objective Truth
by John Lawrence
I saw an amazing interview involving a health care worker who refused to get vaccinated even though it means she will lose her job. Talk about obstinacy. She admitted to being Catholic and even the authority of the Catholic church, whose Pope himself got vaccinated and recommended that others follow his example, was not enough to sway her towards getting the shot. So she's denying the authority of the whole medical science system and the Pope of the Catholic church, elevating her own personal beliefs above those authorities, while at the same time being willing to lose her livelihood. Is this a gigantic child's tantrum or what? Did this person stomp her feet and refuse to eat her pablum? Has she been totally captivated by Fox news and social media? She must be basing her refusal on something. The knowledge that statistically very few vaccinated people have died with COVID while the vast majority of the current deaths are among the unvaccinated evidently means nothing to her.
We've seen this phenomenon before. Strong leaders can even lead willing participants to their deaths. Rolling Stone reported:
"Until the September 11th attacks, the tragedy in Jonestown on November 18th, 1978 represented the largest number of American civilian casualties in a single non-natural event. It is unfathomable now, as it was then, that more than 900 Americans – members of a San Francisco-based religious group called the Peoples Temple – died after drinking poison at the urging of their leader, the Reverend Jim Jones, in a secluded South American jungle settlement. Photographs taken after the carnage forever document the sheer enormity of the event: the bodies of hundreds of people, including children, lying face down in the grass."
We have to ask "how could the Jonestown massacre been prevented?" So could Jim Jones' rights of free speech been curtailed? Could the Peoples Temple have been dissolved by authorities as detrimental to human welfare? Of course to do any of these things would have violated our Constitution and people's rights of free speech and religion. It comes to mind that China wouldn't have any problem doing both if the authorities there felt it was in the people's and/or the country's interest to do so. So is our Constitution flawed when it comes to letting massive deceptions of the American public go on or is it people's right to allow themselves to be deceived which results in their losing their livelihood or even their life?
Where I come down on this is to disallow snake oil salesmen from doing their jobs. Basically, I would censor social media especially as it pertains to the proliferation of lies and untruths. I would censor the purveying of misinformation. This lady that denied the authority of both the Pope and the consensus of medical science probably got her mentality altered by social media which is known to proliferate misinformation. Obviously, Facebook, Instagram and others are not doing enough to police themselves for obvious reasons. Their profit model depends on the proliferation of lies and mistruths. If they weeded out every lie being purveyed on Facebook, it would drastically cut their profits. Misinformation and lies especially if conveyed in a flambuoyant fashion get way more hits than does the bland truth and valid information. Sensationalism sells and makes big profits for social media as well as tabloid newspapers such as the National Enquirer.
Wikipedia explains sensationalism as follows:
"In journalism (and more specifically, the mass media), sensationalism is a type of editorial tactic. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers. This style of news reporting encourages biased or emotionally loaded impressions of events rather than neutrality, and may cause a manipulation to the truth of a story. Sensationalism may rely on reports about generally insignificant matters and portray them as a major influence on society, or biased presentations of newsworthy topics, in a trivial, or tabloid manner, contrary to general assumptions of professional journalistic standards."
"Some tactics include being deliberately obtuse, appealing to emotions, being controversial, intentionally omitting facts and information, being loud and self-centered, and acting to obtain attention. Trivial information and events are sometimes misrepresented and exaggerated as important or significant, and often include stories about the actions of individuals and small groups of people, the content of which is often insignificant and irrelevant to the macro-level day-to-day events occurring globally."
Some people are more easily manipulated than others. The example of the lady in the interview that denied the authority of both medical science and the Catholic church doesn't bode well for unlimited freedom of speech and religion. You can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, but freedom of speech should have a much greater threshold than that. Lies and misinformation in social media at least need to be fact checked by an authority whether governmental or quasi-governmental or otherwise so that every time the misinformation pops up, the fact check also pops up. This in and of itself is not censorship, but it is an intrusion into private business, a regulatory effort to prevent the general public from being hoodwinked. China would have no problem with this and no problem with outright censorship. If the US is to maintain itself as a cohesive society with everyone moving in more or less of a positive direction, some sort of restraint on lies and misinformation needs to be put in place.
