Finding a falsehood on the internet is like finding a needle in a needle stack. Quite often, thanks to social media, it is someone that you know, like, and trust who is passing the lie on to you – not meaning to lie – mind you, but sharing because it made them the right kind of scared, indignant, or warm and fuzzy.
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We’ve all seen this, right? If you’ve been online for more than a year, you have almost undoubtedly received an e-mail or seen a post about how near the end is and how it is all so-and-so’s fault. Likewise you have probably seen a post containing nonsense instructions for how to “protect your privacy.” Of course we can’t forget the “warm and fuzzy” falsehoods like the one I discussed in my post “Illusions of Disempowerment.”
Why is misinformation so common and so powerful?
I have an idea about this, but it does require me to delve pretty deeply into my personal metaphysics. If it works for you, great! If not, well, there might still be some nuggets of gold in here for you anyway.
To my way of seeing, we are more than what we seem. I came to this conclusion over twenty years ago. At that time I was wrestling with ideas of faith and spirituality and trying to harmonize them with my experience of physicality and thought and I ran across a couple of key concepts that seemed “true” to me and rang like a bell when they ran into each other. One of them is an often abbreviated Mormon belief, “The glory of God is intelligence.” The other is the last stanza from Auguries of Innocence by William Blake;
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God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
So here is approximately what I thought when those concepts ran into each other. “Hmm. Glory and light roughly equate to each other, and if light and intelligence are equivalent, how does that play out in our experience? Well, we often describe moments of inspiration using light metaphors, what if we are unknowingly describing the literal truth? What if we we really do have spirits, not like some mystical untouchable thing, but what if our spirits are entities that dwell in another dimension and extrude themselves into our three dimensions in order to have “lives?” What if in that place light and intelligence are in fact the same thing? So the process of learning something is really just the process of moving the candle of our intelligence closer to a piece of knowledge until it is contained within our light? This also explains inspiration where your candle catches a piece of knowledge that you weren’t expecting to see. Oh, and hey, it also explains psychic phenomena, and even divine inspiration. Can it be proven? Nope. Am I okay with that? Yup.”
And that was pretty much that. Everything fell together for me in a way that made sense and was poetically interesting and I had a metaphysics from which to understand my world.
The funny thing is that if I had been just a bit more curious about where this Mormon belief came from I would have read the whole verse from D&C 93:36 “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth,” and had the parallel that intelligence is light spelled out in one sentence.
On a side note, I love finding ideas that ring true from diverse sources. One of my favorites is from “Dragonsbane” a book by Barbara Hambly in which a dragon informs a witch that there is no temptation from outside the heart. Every way I test that idea, it seems true that we must have a desire inside us before the offering of its fulfillment can possibly be ‘temptation.’
I digress.
Back to how this relates to misinformation. I believe that as spiritual beings with innate access to massive resources of information, we crave it in our third dimensional incarnation. At the same time, we are mostly isolated from our spiritual resources and thus we seek information from one another. Information makes us feel powerful and important because information makes us feel just a little bit more like who we really are. So we grab onto information, particularly if it makes us feel something – makes us upset or happy in some way – and we share it as if we know it is true. This in turn grabs the attention of our friends and neighbors and strokes their need for information, and so on.
So here is the thing about lies on the internet. They are going to happen until we all are more comfortable with getting our information from the one source that won’t lie to us – our spirit. In the meantime before you pass on that meme, or forward that e-mail, take a moment and ask yourself whether you believe that it is really 100% true. If the answer is “I don’t know,” some research is probably in order. I know it may seem wacky to say “Rely on your intuition,” but intuition is a first line of defense against falsehood that we often ignore.
I think that a second line of defense against falsehood is the question, “Is this information disempowering in any way?” But that is a subject for another time.