People Don’t Know Shit

“It’s all one big conspiracy in the White House,” a cab driver exclaimed when we were talking about 9/11 on this year’s anniversary. I am pretty sure that he didn’t have a smoking-gun evidence of anything to substantiate any of his opinions that he was sharing.

I love how people who have no first-hand access to any information about what’s going on behind closed doors in political offices love to talk and hypothesize about the politicians’ motives, plans, and intentions. Do we realize how ridiculous we sound when we do this? And we do this everywhere—during a happy hour, dinner parties, etc. Sure, having strong opinions about politics, drugs, abortion, the death penalty, religion, terrorism, and other hotly debated issues makes us sound like we’re smart and we care—even if we talk completely out of our asses—but it’s unwise.

If you’re sitting in a classroom and one of your classmates gets up during a political science lecture and starts accusing some bank CEO of corruption or embezzlement, try to resist the urge to shut him up. Just laugh on the inside, and start thinking about where you’ll be going out that night or the night after until he is done dispensing useless information based on nothing but his own conjecture.

Go to your local Best Buy store and conduct the following experiment: Ask one of the sales clerks which laptop or camera is the best one for you to buy. How many of them are going to give you an honest answer? None. Do you know what the most honest answer should be every single time? Let me quote it for you: “I’m just a sales clerk. I don’t have any professional or educational background in design or manufacturing of the products you’re asking about, so I can’t really tell you much about which item is better. You are better off reading reviews online than asking someone like me.”  This is no different in car dealerships, of course, where your typical sleazy salesman will try to make it sound like he’s a cutting-edge mechanical engineer who put the cars together with his own hands.

What about CNN and MSNBC? Obama gives a 20-minute speech, and the news hosts and their “panel of experts” belabor every word, trying to interpret them, while make a bunch of assumptions about what the President must have meant or what he really wanted to say. Who cares what they think? What can they possibly know about what’s going on in the President’s head? Being dressed up, having tons of make up, and sitting next to a shiny glass table at a TV studio doesn’t make them know what’s really going on.

Let’s face it: we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do, and we rely way too much on hearsay. Then, we take that likely false information and share it with our friends over drinks, when there’s nothing better to talk about. Perhaps it’s time we realized how little we know and start looking for more reliable answers to our questions.

One obvious and immediate solution is not blindly relying on what you read online and what you hear on TV, but giving those who are being roasted by the media the benefit of the doubt. It’s so easy to say what someone else could have done better, but it’s harder to look in the mirror and tell yourself what you can do better. Walking barefoot at a gas station is not the classiest thing to do, but that alone doesn’t make Britney Spears a demon. Twerking at the VMA awards show is obnoxious on so many levels, and even though I’m no fan of Miley Cyrus, that trashy move alone does not make her evil.

Traveling is another way of getting reliable information about other places in the world. I’ve never been to our so-called enemy countries, but I bet that I’d be pleasantly surprised in quite a few ways if I visited Syria, Lebanon, and even Afghanistan—and I hope to go there one day once the military conflicts in that region are over (and before the gender dynamics in those countries are poisoned by the ways of the West). I’m sure we could learn a lot from them.

So far, every person I know who’s traveled to Cuba reports that it was their most memorable travel destination ever. Roosh knows this better than anyone else, having spent time in such places as Colombia and Brazil on one hand, and Poland and Ukraine on the other. He must have seen some bad things but, overall, life in those countries isn’t as bad as he probably thought it was before he went there. He makes it very clear in his writings that many of the truly important aspects of living in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and other areas of the world that we’re used to thinking of as having a lower standard of living than the US are actually superior to ours.

They say knowledge is power. Does it mean that false knowledge is weakness? If so, let’s make sure that at the very least we don’t give away the power we already have and not let others mislead us so easily.

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