Raining here, flashflood there, car-jacking, uprising, earthquake in Canterbury, deserted cities in Libya, desperate dictators clinging to scraps, pundits opining endlessly, victory for Rahm, angry state employees, justice department flip-flop, pranking Governors, what about Africa?

Oh sorry I was just reading my mobile feeds. Sure is a lot of information. It is information, isn’t it? Information: noun: knowledge obtained from investigation, study or instruction. That poses a dilemma, because I don’t know where half of this stuff is coming from. It seems to me like once one news agency stamps a story with their credentials, it gets picked up by a thousand others, and before you know it—bam! Information.

What’s the alternative? If we limited our acceptance of information to only that which we gathered through personal observation or investigation (and by that I mean using rudimentary tools—paper, pencil, magnifying glass, tweezers, or anything we happen to invent ourselves—to collect data on the observable world around us), we’d be starting from scratch. We make conclusions on a regular basis that force us to rely on layers and layers of knowledge, built up over centuries, which we really have no way of verifying. Bravo to the ancients who spent their whole lives observing the natural world and humankind just to conclude a few things that actually stood the test of time.

A good balance is always nice. “Take it with a grain of salt,” they say. Don’t believe everything you hear, unless of course it supports your predetermined conclusions and worldview. Then it’s probably true. If I’m a liberal I listen to NPR and fret over the warming oceans, because I believe they are warming, I’ve seen satellite pictures of the Arctic, which I don’t have to go to school to interpret. If I’m a conservative, I smugly comment about how the BP oil spill was exaggerated and how Al Gore used a private jet to travel everywhere on his “Inconvenient Truth” tour. Or is that just what liberals and conservatives think about each other? How do I answer that without googling it?

Someone says, “read Atlas shrugged. It’ll blow your mind.” Someone else says, “you have to read The Shack—it changed my life!” A third says “I don’t read. Why not accomplish something instead of just sitting there, reading?” I ask: is it possible to reach adulthood in this modern society and not already be a closed book? The question seems rhetorical, because if I am asking it, then I must not be a closed book type of person, right? But can you really be open minded if you're closed minded to close mindedness? I mentioned balance a minute ago—that could be the answer. Truth and falsity exist in frequently unknown proportions within bodies of information. The aim should not be to confirm what we feel, but to identify the truth, regardless of its consequences for our realities. The right mix of incredulity, doubt, a genuine desire to know the truth, and a good capacity for observation and deduction makes neither an open mind nor a closed one, but one that sees or tries to see the world for what it is. So just develop all those things, okay?

By the way, you have to read “A Confederacy of Dunces”—it’ll blow your mind and change your life.


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