We now seem to base our decisions and actions on “credibility” rather than truth/reality /fact (or at least, an earnest attempt thereat). We have become too busy, time-pressured, information overloaded, apathetic and lazy to care about truth and reality, settling for the far lower standard of credibility, which is merely “believable, worthy of belief, convincing.” This lower standard opens the doors wide to those who profit from deliberate confusion, half-truths, misrepresentation and outright lies.. and in so doing they undermine society and democracy.

Modern, science-based society emphasizes Quantity at the expense of Quality (innate excellence/ depth/ value) and this gap has rapidly widened through technological advances and the ascendance, especially over the last 30 years, of unregulated Free Market capitalism. Advocates of the Free Market believe that “market forces” (profit/ $/ Quantity) will fix all social problems, except “law and order” which requires the police and military. However, even in the richest and most un-regulated country in the world, America, the middle class is being destroyed and social problems abound. The USA has fallen dramatically in most global quality-of-life indexes.

Why is this issue of credibility/ reality / truth important? If we (either individually or collectively) make bad or mistaken decisions, then life becomes more conflicted and difficult. At present, we seem so stressed trying to fix past mistakes, we give no time to inquiring why we made bad choices in the first place...so we keep on repeating our errors. On TV last night, a person-on- the- street being interviewed on the upcoming Canadian elections confidently declared, “Let’s deal with the budget and economic issues first, then we can discuss ethics.” But “ethics” (which includes values, ideologies, morals, ambition) mould the people who in turn mould politics and budgets! Some politicians want you to focus on small details like little tax breaks, so you don’t see the underlying policy shifts and big money grabs – like fighter jets, jails, corporate breaks, consultancy fees etc. Pulitzer Prize winner, Chris Hedges, believes that America has dumbed itself down and wrote an entire book about the process - Empire of Illusion: End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Increasingly, people’s opinions and values are formed by the mass media and the internet – lots of information and opinions.. again Quantity rather than Quality. Some celebrate this process as the ultimate form of Democracy, but there are several major draw-backs to this belief:
• The quality of any Democracy / society depends on the quality of the decisions made by citizens/ voters. Greater numbers of votes do not mean more quality/ truth/ grasp of reality. If you’re digging a hole in the wrong place, there’s no benefit to digging it deeper.
• If there is only quantity and no idea of quality, there’s no basis for making decisions – we become overwhelmed by the mass of info and opinions. We then try to short-cut decision-making by going with (unexamined) emotional or gut feelings. Professional “persuaders” – advertisers, political strategists etc – have long recognized that for most people, emotions trump reason. The neo-cons in America (aped by Harper’s Tories) have used this strategy effectively through focus groups, emotionally loaded words, talking points and repetition. The average person is still in denial (as many studies show), avowing that they are too savvy to be taken in.

• As Entertainment (popularity/ quantity/ passivity/ fantasy) seeps into every aspect of our lives, when we seek “expertise”, it’s often based on celebrity, recognition factor, sexiness etc. Increasingly, actors get elected in the USA – Reagan, Schwarzenegger etc. They appear on TV dispensing advice on all sorts of matters; Berlusconi’s Italian government is packed with “babes”; Oprah makes you an instant “expert “... but see Maclean’s mag recent cover – “Oprah’s Bad Advice – a surprising number of her self-help gurus are now admitting they are total screw ups”.

So how can we begin to turn this around? A few suggestions:
1. Recognize that there is a problem. We can’t change if we don’t acknowledge the need for it.
2. Pay attention to yourself and pay attention to others. This usually takes skill, perseverance and expert guidance; it’s skilful meditation rather than intellectual analysis or indulgently “tripping out”. Aldous Huxley wrote: “Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing”. A brief example of this re the political process – If an aware individual merely read a decent newspaper and looked at some decent TV news, it would have been obvious at the time that George W Bush was “cherry-picking” the facts to start a war against Iraq on false pretences... just as it is obvious that Harper is aping Bush’s tactics in Canada. In life, both individually and collectively, change can only incur in the moment...analyzing mistakes afterwards don’t mean anything unless it leads to real change, which must happen in the Now.
3. Act on the new information that your attention brings you. This may mean changing your life style, priorities, relationships, how you eat, what you buy etc. Genuine inquiry into “self” leads to a sense of expansion and interconnection.
If you want to get started on this process of inquiry, I have a couple of workshops coming up soon on Meditation and Mind-Body Personal Mastery. Check out these workshops on www.harmonydawn.com