Truth And Emotional Management
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These days, the intersection between truth and information is becoming smaller and smaller, leaving us with nothing but opinions and biases that often clash with one another in spectacular ways. How do we manage our emotions in this era of informational overload and normalized intolerance? In this episode Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the unsettling reality that humanity has lost the ability to process truth from facts simply because of the sheer speed and volume of unfiltered information that bombard us every day. With bit after bit of information validating each of our biases, it has become very easy for unscrupulous powers to hijack people’s beliefs and biases and purchase truth. How does that make you feel? We live in a world full of triggers. Now is the time to learn how to reframe our response to stimuli to avoid being overwhelmed.
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My head is spinning with all the messages that I’m hearing in our country and all the communication going back and forth.
It’s difficult to be in this state that we’re in. Emotions are all over the place. We need to try to make some sense of this. Can we do that?
I’m glad we are talking about this topic because when we look at truth in the managing of emotions, we’ve got to watch how we take things. When somebody says or does something, that’s a stimulus. Our response is how we take it. There are many stories I could share with you about somebody says something, somebody takes it a certain way, something comes out of that person’s mouth, and the thing goes sideways and the conflict starts blowing up. We are not doing a great job adapting to our technology in our environment. Our texting, our emailing, our communication, our news media and our video clips have become so penetrating.
It’s like our brain is having the hardest time dealing with this fundamental onslaught of information, opinions, biases, fallacies and beliefs that we can’t find a fact anywhere. What winds up happening is stimulus response. Our response is based on a belief. It’s not even based on a fact. It becomes so instantaneous. Violence is coming out of our mouth and the person doesn’t even know the violence. The person’s not ready to hear a person’s belief because their fact hasn’t even been heard yet. It’s an unsettling discussion because we’ve lost the ability to process truth because of the speed and the volume of information. There are all kinds of stories we can tell about how truth is getting hijacked.
There are lots of things. We’re seeing a lot of things happen in the present moment in some of the courts around the country, in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Can we agree that our court system is supposed to be an arbiter of truth? Is that fair to say?
It’s the arbiter of truth based on a set of written legal agreements or legal casement. They’re called precedent. Here is this precedent that this legal court decided upon. When we overturn something that was a legal precedent. It was a law and we overturn it, then we start working at the new law. At one time, slavery was legal until there was a new law that was written that slavery is illegal. You can’t buy or sell a person. My favorite one is in Saudi Arabia slavery was legal many years ago. You could own somebody. It’s unsettling to even say. Years ago, slavery was legal in Saudi Arabia and other countries down there in the Middle East. It’s upsetting. Hundred years ago, slavery was legal one day and the other day it wasn’t legal. The courts are trying to work off of legal precedents that were set. The court decides it and then other states choose to adopt that legal status or that precedent.
That’s helpful. Thank you.
The judge is the arbiter of truth if something is legal or not. People would get upset every time I get in this discussion about how to communicate truth because morals and ethics are not legally prosecuted by the court. You can do something morally and unethical, but if there’s no law written about it, you can’t do anything about it. What winds up happening and what’s happening with the speed of social media, people can’t tell the difference because if something’s not moral or not ethical and somebody does it, an individual might say, “Somebody should do something about that.” The only way that we used to be able to deal with moral and ethical things is through guilt and shame. We don’t have those tools anymore.
It seems that we’re in a completely new era, in a new place regarding truth and especially morals and ethics. There was a time at which the media would try hard not to say the president lied about anything. They would say, “He’s stretching the truth,” or what would the euphemisms be that he would say?
We have lost the ability to process truth because of the speed and the volume of information that bombard us every day.
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He exaggerates and spins. A couple of years in, people on Fox leaned on that. He doesn’t lie. He exaggerates and spins. Lying or not lying is a moral and ethical thing. It’s not necessarily a legal thing. Unless there’s damage from the lie that somebody wants to follow. This is where certain people can get away with a lot of stuff because, “I lied but are you going to spend the money to prosecute me? I broke the contract, but are you going to spend $100,000 because I have $1 million. I will bankrupt you on the way of you trying to reinstate this contract. I will legally bury you because I have more money than you do.”
That’s been the Donald Trump mode of business for his entire career.
I feel unsettled by what you said because it activates morals and ethics inside me. Money in the way the system works has created a great disadvantage to truth because you have to spend to get truth. You got to spend to get justice. Is that the way this one’s being played out? The answer is yes, that’s the way it works. I’m exasperated even saying it because it doesn’t meet my need for integrity and justice that there’s that much influence against something that’s moral or ethically not being able to prosecute because I don’t have enough money to get there.
We have the situation where aside from it being the court side of this thing and using the courts, “I’m going to outspend you. I’m going to bury you in legal fees. I’m going to bankrupt you. If you don’t agree to me, even though what I want may not be in alignment with the contract I signed. Go and try to sue me and force me.” Now we’ve gotten to the point where it used to be that when a president got up to the podium in the White House, they would try hard not to say something that was obviously untrue. It’s now common for the President to get up at the podium and say something that’s not true. Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts.” They try to spin it, but all that the President cares about is that half of America believes what he’s saying and isn’t going to challenge him as to whether it’s true or not. He doesn’t care what the other half thinks.
He is not interested in that. He’s not trying to work way back to the middle. I feel unsettled by this conversation because we’ve got to manage our emotions in the current moment. By saying, “I feel unsettled, I feel uncomfortable, I feel exasperated,” is me managing my own emotions. I am feeling that because my need for integrity, ethics, fairness and morals are not met. I’m managing my own damn emotions. All of a sudden, I’m feeling mad that I have to do this. I feel mad that there’s not a higher integrity in narrative and it’s affecting my integrity, my morals and my ethics because somebody seeds a conversation and starts a narrative, and then starts reinforcing it to hijack people’s beliefs.
I’ll start with the first narrative, and then we can find out. “I don’t believe in mail-in votes. I think there’s a lot of fraud that can take place there.” When the President started that, he planted the seed that truth and trust cannot be met with mail-in votes. It automatically makes everybody scramble to find out if it’s true or not. Instead of facing it down and saying, “No, you cannot talk about this unless you have evidence. You have a lot of power and you have a lot of influence with your voters,” the Republicans did not call him out on that right away. Mitt Romney tried to but he had to tap dance it in there because the rest of his party was going to take his head off if he did. Does that make sense now?
It does make sense, but it’s interesting to see the collision between the things that Donald Trump says that are untrue, that are meant to hijack truth and sow those seeds of doubt like, “There have been tons of voter fraud in Pennsylvania.” He talks about dead people voting and people who were denied the right to vote. This is claiming that voters in Pennsylvania and certain counties we’re not allowed to cure their absentee ballots as if there would be enough of them to overturn the election but they plant these seeds of doubt.
You put your version of truth in there which is good that you did because it is true, “As if there is enough to overturn the votes.” You slipped it in. What happens is from the person that’s trying to talk about a vote being valid or not, they will pick that sentence that you said and they will start arguing with that as a distractor. It shouldn’t matter if it’s enough or not. What matters is, is this vote being counted or not? They’ll use that little phrase that you said there and take the thing sideways because it is an argument on whether or not the need for truth and trust can be met with one single vote to the best of our ability.
To the best of our ability is a pursuit of truth as a process. We’re not going to get it 100% right, but you are not going to argue about a 0.101% untruth. “There’s a dead person that voted.” Tucker Carlson did it. He took that woman’s vote. He took it out on national media. He said, “How can this mister do this vote? He died?” The answer is it was his wife that made the vote and that’s the way she was listed on the voter’s ballot because back in the past, women used to call themselves their husband’s name. He later apologized but the tragedy was about the way the brain works. It’s too late because it gives evidence that 0.0001% of something is evidence that dead people vote.
Everybody hears the initial claim, they don’t hear the apology or the retraction, and the damage is done. This collision between what Donald Trump says and doing these sorts of things, and what happens in a court of law, who’s the arbiter of truth? This happened with Rudy Giuliani, as he’s representing Donald Trump trying to get a lot of votes thrown out. He’s alleging that, “These people weren’t allowed to cure their vote.” The reality is the judge keeps asking Rudy Giuliani questions, “You’re alleging that the two individual plaintiffs were denied the right to vote. Is that correct?”
He says yes but he says, “At the end of the day, you’re asking the court to invalidate more than 6.8 million votes and then disenfranchising every single voter in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” He asked Giuliani, “How can you justify that? Can you tell me how these two voters that couldn’t be cured justifies disenfranchising 6.8 million people?” Giuliani didn’t have an answer, but he kept arguing that the Donald Trump campaign was blocked from observing the ballot processing in key cities. The Democrats could have conspired to commit fraud by counting absentee ballots in addition to regular ballots. The judge at the end of the day came back. There were things that had been thrown out in the case the day before in their complaint, and the Republicans were no longer alleging fraud.
He got back to Giuliani and said, “Are you alleging fraud now? Is there any fraud you’re trying to say in this case?” Giuliani said, “No, we’re not alleging any fraud.” At the end of the day, the reality is the arbiter of truth is peeling back all these wild accusations, trying to get at truth. They do get at truth at the end of the day. They’re not even alleging fraud. It made me question why Donald Trump’s doing this. Why is he sending Rudy Giuliani in and continuing to argue these things if they’re not alleging fraud and they’re not achieving a goal of changing the result of the election in certain states. It’ll be too late. It’s going to cast enough doubt. It’s sowing seeds of doubt in half of America that is going to feel justified and saying the election was rigged. There’s no longer a direct end game of trying to overturn the election. It’s laying a justification for how to characterize the election in the eyes of Donald Trump.
There is nothing more powerful than the phrase “sowing seeds of doubt.” The seeds are language and phrases that are reinforcing needs that the listener can feel doubtful about. A brain that experiences doubt and skeptical becomes inactive. It doesn’t question the doubt or question the source anymore. Doubt and skepticism is the poison to curiosity and creativity. It’s the poison that separates us from ourselves. If you feel doubt and skeptical about something, you will not ask the curious question that will allow you to have the breakthrough to find where the truth lies.
The issue is not whether or not somebody upsets another person by doing something or saying something. It’s the doubt and skepticism on our own body that prevents us from taking the action that would lead us to the breakthrough, “I don’t want to say something at work. I don’t want to ruffle the feathers, it’s too dangerous. We haven’t made it safe for ourselves to talk to each other.” It’s the judgmental voices. There are certain people that create doubt and create skepticism. It cast doubt on the other person.
One good quick example of this happened in Michigan. You had Wayne County, Michigan, which is the biggest county where Detroit is. Their board of electors had to certify the vote. There are two Democrats, two Republicans. Their Democrats voted initially to certify the vote and the Republicans did not and they were at a stalemate. Due to public outcry and even some other Republicans in the legislature at Michigan putting pressure on those Republican people that had the vote to certify, change their vote. They did vote to certify and it was unanimous to certify it. The deadline was met on November 17, 2020. Those votes in the county are certified going on to the state to be completely certified.
Donald Trump called each of those two people the next day. They then recanted. They’re saying they filed affidavits. They’ve signed affidavits saying, “I want to change my vote back. I don’t want to certify the election.” There is no mechanism to do that and it doesn’t look like this is going to result in any change in the certification of the vote. It’s going to give Donald Trump a reason to say the vote in Michigan is problematic. It’s tainted and fraud. It can’t be trusted.
It’s not just one county. The entire state of Michigan is tainted. It gives one little incident of two people struggling with their own internal ethics and morals about, “Is this valid or is this not valid? I heard that. It’s all hearsay.” Donald Trump’s ability to market and promote that hearsay is true. He’s made an entire living off of that, “Some people have said, some people know, you won’t believe what is happening. It’s called Obamagate. Look it up.” He’s throwing spaghetti on the wall to see how much of the spaghetti he can get to stick and how long he can get it to stick.
Obamagate, is there any proof? Is there anything legal about that? Is there something morally about that? The newspaper people are not understanding that that narrative is not helpful to disprove something because you’re reinforcing doubt and skepticism that is what the orange hair is wanting you to do. Reinforce doubt and skepticism because the brain is not looking for truth. It’s looking for the validation of a bias.
What should everybody be doing? What should the media be doing? What should Joe Biden be doing? The media is saying, “He is the president-elect.” They’re making the statement, which is the factual statement. We’ve often said the facts don’t always help. They’re making the factual statement, “He is the president-elect. He’s won the election.”
My biggest guidance to Joe Biden is to start using sentences that set the vision like, “It sounds like the two Republicans in Michigan were feeling doubtful and skeptical about certification. I’m interested in making sure that they have confidence in doing that. I want them to feel good about the certification. I wonder how we can get greater truth and trust for them to do that so they can certify it, and they don’t have to recant anything.” Notice, I’m asking the curious question into it. Not the racists.
You’re not making a statement. You’re asking a question, you’re showing curiosity, which hopefully will make others ask questions and feel curiosity.
That cast doubt and skepticism on the person that’s trying to stir the pot. Why are they asking for it? They’re asking for it for this reason.
It casts doubt and skepticism on the original doubt and skepticism. Is that what you’re saying?
t throws a bucket of water on it and all of a sudden doubt and skepticism is out. It minimalizes it to the level it needs to be minimalized, 0.001%. It could be there.
Language is a powerful weapon if you know how to use it properly, but it seems Donald Trump knows how to use that a whole lot better than the people that would oppose it.
He’s so good at hijacking people without knowing it. The word hijacking is label and diagnosis. The better phrase is that it taps into the person’s beliefs and biases, and it builds agreement. It’s in a tragic way. It’s at the expense of truth and trust, but it is building agreement inside the person so they buy what he’s selling. More to do that on how things can be bought and sold through language choice. It’s an interesting time that we’re living in and purchasing truth is what’s happening here.
It is happening all over the place on a daily basis. A lot of people feel unsettled because of it. There is too much uncertainty. What a lot of people voted for was restoration and healing, and we had enough of this daily rollercoaster ride of an assault on truth.
There are more to come on this, Tom. There’s a next time. We’ll start increasing some messages in our narrative about what can you say or do back to that.
That would be helpful. We don’t want to sit here and take it. What do we say to combat it? You gave us a clue. I appreciate it.
Thanks, Bill.
Thanks.
Important Links:
- https://www.CNN.com/2020/11/17/politics/trump-giuliani-election-lawsuit/index.html
- https://www.CNN.com/2020/11/19/politics/gop-michigan-results-trump/index.html
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