Incongruity – Distractions from critical thinking

Recently Queen Elizabeth passed away. To be sure she was a nice person who had devoted herself to her country and her people. She deserved to be celebrated. However, the news coverage, the money spent on her funeral, the time and cost of flying in hundreds of world leaders, the security, and the pomp and ceremony. All of it seemed so much.

Meanwhile, only days before a mass grave full of Ukrainian civilians, many with their hands tied and showing obvious signs of torture gets barely five minutes in the news over a couple of days. According to one report, four billion people watched the Queen’s funeral. Somewhere in all the news coverage, I couldn’t help but wonder why? Elizabeth was a monarch representing the British Empire and as nice as she, she was a direct link to some of the worst examples of oppression and colonialism the world has ever seen. The incongruity is overwhelming.

Was this just an extreme one-off example of critical thinking taking a holiday?

I suggest not. As I wrote this post, I looked at the top trending news stories on my home page. “What is the meaning of “ER” and what will be the symbol of King Charles?” followed by “Watch Justin Trudeau caught butchering a Queen (rock band) classic,” followed by “UN Chief warns global leaders: the world is in great peril (climate change). Of those three stories, which do you think is important? 

Why does it matter?

We live in an information age. We have more information at our disposal than at any other point in human history. The problem is that we are inundated with so much distracting information and conflicting information how can anyone determine what is important? How do we sort through everything to find what is important, what is true, and how do we get the right information to understand our world and to make decisions at a personal, academic, and professional level?

Building, developing, and using our critical thinking skills is the key.

A good place to begin using critical thinking is to determine “What are the facts?” The information available to use isn’t necessarily factual. Also, how do we determine what is true? Former President Donald Trump seems to believe that the more you tell a lie, the more likely people will be to thinking he is telling the truth. He might be right because he has successfully distorted the facts so much that 35% of Americans believe that he won the 2020 election despite overwhelming facts that the election wasn’t stolen. If an ex-president can lie so blatantly, how do you find the truth?

Everyone needs to understand that some news broadcasting has become “ratings dependent,” and “spun” by their parent organizations to support the broadcaster’s agenda. Diving deeper into stories instead of accepting a 30-second sound bite is a good place to start. There isn’t a single news story that can be explained in 30 seconds, we miss so many details and almost all the nuance in mainstream media. One solution is reading more than one source. Local and world events take hours and days, and we should appreciate that many news outlets are simply choosing the most sensational elements to report on. Appreciate too that many stories are not published by accredited journalists and watch for content that is simply opinions that may or may not be supported by the facts.

There are good news sources.  Look for consensus between sources and watch for fact-checking comments from people who have the credentials to make unbiased comments. As always ask questions, seek out opinions from people you know, and think about what seems right and wrong to you. Unfortunately, the number of newspapers has fallen precipitously in the last few decades and the ones that are left seem to copy stories, so the availability of independent reporting and detailed stories is much more difficult to find. Most people would be surprised to learn that only a handful of people determine the stories you read. The book Empire of Illusion, by Chris Hedges, offers a detailed examination of this issue.

Fear mongering is a way to build ratings. Many commentators and media people will use this tactic to grab attention. The motivational business speaker, Brian Tracy, once said, “The media has predicted eighteen of the past two recessions.”  Examine any form of media, chances are that the only stories you will find are disasters and “bad news” content.

What can we do? I have mentioned some things already, but my advice would be to listen more to whatever media you follow. Really try to glean the meaning, the spin, and ask yourself what might be missing. Using critical thinking skills doesn’t make you cynical, it doesn’t make you a conspiracy theorist, it makes you engaged in the world around you.  

Listen, ask questions, and express your opinions. Try to separate the rhetoric from the messages people on the news are trying to communicate. Ask questions and repeat the question if you are not satisfied with the answer. A trend during Covid that was disturbing was the number of times different leaders limited the number of questions they would accept, sometimes our provincial leaders would go days without having a press conference. Many times, if you listened, they would attempt to change the question and provide answers that never addressed the asker’s actual point.  We simply cannot allow that to happen anymore.

More of us need to express our opinions. We should remember the adage though, “Ready Aim Shoot,” however so that what we say is appropriate and we appreciate that once words are spoken or written it is difficult to take them back. We should expect people to disagree with us, but that is okay. Healthy disagreement, conversation, and debate are good and should be encouraged. When we are challenged, and we challenge others there is more thought and more consideration of different solutions and that is what we need.

Through conversation and debate, more people will start to think critically about things going on around us. The issues of the world can seem overwhelming and there are many misconceptions about causes and effects.  By thinking more and encouraging others to think more we will begin to illuminate and reveal these misconceptions.

Many leaders try to rally their people around simple slogans and appeal to their pride. We have become regions where “herd mentality,” is becoming the norm. We need leaders to find good, perhaps even complex, solutions to our issues and problems. 

We need more than just statements about “More Freedom” or “Make America proud,” because all those statements do is gloss over the truth about “how” we can have more freedom or how we can create a better community for our families to live in.

By critically thinking we will start to demand more truth, more transparency, more detail, and more accountability from our leaders and from our broadcasters.

The queen died. We should be asking; do we need a new King? We should be asking what world problems could be solved if the royal property were returned to the people or nations it was taken from. Radical? No, just a question, but it is the kind of question we should be asking. Look at the top ten trending news stories online, and ask yourself, “What information are you missing, Is this important? What important stories are not being mentioned?” The queen died, and more than 300 people died in Ukraine and were buried in mass graves. There are more in Syria, Afghanistan, in Africa. More than half of the world doesn’t have clean drinking water. The new King is bound by tradition to give up his efforts to promote human rights. We need to ask ourselves why we tolerate this incongruity. The time for critical thinking has never been more necessary for us to ask questions and to see what is important. Please help make this happen, demand more of yourself, your friends and family, your organization, your community, and your leaders.

Thank you,

Paul.