Lets talk about trust baby!
Trust is the most fundamental foundation of truth and all relationships, with the exception of love. Real simple basic natural love, not the man-woman 'I love you' love.
Another way to put it is that if you have trust, all is OK, and if you do not have trust, all is irrelevant.
Every aspect of all your beliefs is based on what you have been taught and what you have experienced. Every fact and factoid has to be tested for trust. Including your
experiences: can you trust your memory, your eyes and ears? We have all seen enough magic shows to know we can be fooled.
I do not like the word 'fact', and to some degree the misuse of the word 'truth'. In reality there is only evidence and hueman interpretation of that evidence. For example, if someone asks 'why is the sky blue?', and someone replies 'because the atmosphere scatters blue light and lets all others through' there are many 'facts' and assumptions
we can examine. For starters, we may not all see the same colour called blue. Colour-blnd people can not discern red-green. So we can define blue light as having a particular wavelength, say 450 nm. Which means we need a common understanding of the number '450' and what a nm - nanometer is. We also need to define what light is to understand what wavelength refers to. I necessarily got technical here because in our world today there are many throw-away lines declared as 'fact' or truth which the speaker is unable to explain, they just memorised a phrase, and because it appears to be popular, it is assumed to be true. They 'trust' popular belief to be true even though there is no supporting evidence.
A topical issue is the act of 'catching a cold or flu'. While mainstream belief is that a virus is the cause of the flu and experience seems to correlate, it is most likely a delusion. Terrain theory is much more widely supported by micro-biologists today than germ theory due to massive experimental evidence. The terrain theory explanation is that some toxin in some environment is causing multiple people to get sick and shed those toxins in the form of viruses. It is as contagious as a laugh or a yawn.
Back to trust and 'truth'. Just a quick reminder we are not dealing with our Value system, we are dealing with beliefs. Truths and facts are hierarchical - facts depend on other facts and at some point you would consider a fact as immutable - it is pure truth, the ground you walk on. When you deem a fact this way, you had better be sure you trust the source of that. Because you may build a tower on that land and if the foundation is flawed the whole tower comes down.
So what is trust? We have not really defined it. But there's a problem. The general dictionary definition uses words like 'reliable' and 'truth' when defining trust. In computing or IT terms trust is easier to define: is something genuine, as it claims to be, such as a database connection or internet connection. But the general definition is scarily circular with truth. Minor aside: I am a very clear thinker, not such a great deep thinker - more on that later. Many paragraphs of deep philosophical discussion omitted, trust, truth and fundamental/immutable facts become indistinguishable.
This is getting longer than I wanted. My mission is to get people thinking; to get people questioning trust and truth of various sources of information, including their own senses. Also that popularity is not proof of anything. Understanding is paramount! I will never quote something as fact or truth that I am not able to fully explain, or if not I will qualify my statement 'probably' or some such indicator. Consistency is the best way to achieve understanding and confidence/trust in something.
OK my real purpose of this is to prepare you for the next few installments, which may reveal things contrary to some of your immutable truths. And enable me to see higher truths as well, because this community has incredible depth and breadth of wisdom.
I have been on my journey for some years now, but only re-learned to think clearly again a few years ago. And its a buzz!
Hopefully this will tickle a few brain cells. Trust me, I have a plan.
Spread love!