Contextual belief (day 60)

I just listened to Peter Schiff speak in a somewhat desperate tone about the US dollar being devalued and on route to becoming worthless.  Hyperinflation.  He sounded scared or maybe a mixture of incredulous and desperate for people to wake up.  He sounded convincing perhaps in large measure because he's Peter Schiff, predictor of collapses.   I tried to imagine it was someone else saying these things and how much I believed it.  I do this kind of context test sometimes when I'm in a new city and feel like it's very different than where I came from.  I imagine that I'm actually in my home city, just somewhere I've never walked or driven before.  Where is it in the city?  Close to which neighbourhood?  I get curious about how much cognitive effort it takes to map the new city to my home city and how I feel about the new city afterward.   I do this as an exercise to see how clouded my perception might be by the assumption that where I am is totally different because it's thousands of kilometres away and the people dress differently.  I admit this may strike some people as odd (I know it).  But try it sometime.  It's actually a neat exercise to challenge contextual bias.   Once you start doing it in one situation, it's sort of addictive.  So back to Peter Schiff and his ilk - the people that speak with conviction and write books.  There was something in Peter's voice that was haunting, like a 'please wake up' quality.  I found myself thinking about context but this time in a different way.   Could the things that we are told about other incompetent or 'evil' governments apply to the United States?  And I'm not talking about the direct aggression.  I'm talking about the deliberate devaluing of currency combined with misinforming the public.  You know the type of behaviour that gets people clanging pots out of windows and into the streets, en masse.   I couldn't quite make the leap of context but I came close.  The changes are happening in slow motion so it's hard to understand the trajectory and harder to believe that it couldn't be stopped.  So far, Peter Schiff has convinced me that shifting money away from US currency is probably a safe and good idea.  But not convinced enough to call every one of my friends and tell them to do so.  Trust is so hard to come by.  One thing's for sure, extreme points of view are good at changing the context suddenly if not permanently.

A song for this post.

Is this real life? (day 56)

Reality.  That word gets more fuzzy every day.  It's one of those words where you think you know what it is but as soon as you start explaining it you end up neck deep in caveats.  It's a fuzzy concept precisely because it's defined as 'you know it when you're in it'.   The first crack is the realization that you're never out of it.   Maybe we should specify 'shared reality'.  That's a little closer to something precise and takes care of dream and drug spaces.  The real problem is that beyond straight up stimulus to our sense organs, there is a layered conceptual reality which is emergent and involved in a feedback loop on itself.  The term shared reality is a little better because it recognizes that the forces on the conceptual layers are largely shared by immediate neighbours (in a physical and/or cultural sense).   I recently saw a documentary on Jonestown where they explained that loudspeakers were constantly broadcasting Jones' voice.  At no time or place could the residents be free of his voice and his opinions.  He offered a view of the outside world that was both paranoid and delusional and they had no way of verifying what he was saying.  They were still in the same sensual reality that all people inhabit but their shared conceptual reality was both disconnected and discontinuous from the other shared realities.  What is astonishing is that at the moment between life and death only a few people trusted their basic sensual reality and decided to run.  Some after seeing their children die.  And these were not weak or deficient people.  They worked hard and had ideals that are hard to argue with.  The situation again brings up my paranoia about not knowing what I don't know.   It's important to diversify media sources.  And even then, you still have to suss out the most likely facts.  When the Yes Men pulled their last prank about the US Chamber of Commerce reversing its stance on climate change, it reminded me again how arbitrary the truth is.

A song for this post.