Conspiracy vs. Transparency: Finding Truth in Misinformation

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With everything going on in the news, it’s hard to pinpoint which ones are true. Bill Stierle and Tom talk about the mounds of misinformation presented to the world today. Most of the people around us have different belief systems. What’s worse is, nobody wants to admit that they’re wrong. Listen in as Tom and Bill share how important it is to filter through misinformation at the height of the pandemic.



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Conspiracy vs. Transparency: Finding Truth in Misinformation

It has become clear to me from my little perspective that there are such varying perspectives on the COVID situation in our country. It has become very clear to me in the discussions with some of my close friends and my experience being in another state that there are two very different worlds Americans are living in now. We don’t understand each other as well as we could. I have seen this firsthand with a more conservative person asking questions like, “Why all the testing,” because where they live, it is not a part of their daily concern or lives. It isn’t impacting them it seems.

That’s the hard part. How do you start with a compassionate and empathetic response rather than an explanation, informational or problem-solving response? How do you start with a compassionate and empathetic response to somebody just generally trying to reach out for information? That is one of the problems that we are facing. The biggest problem outside of COVID is how do we deal with and separate the mounds of information that is available to us? It is too much for our brains to process and find a stable thread of certainty. Think how difficult that sentence is.

I don’t know if there is one.

CDC changes its guidelines based on the best facts they have when changing the guidelines. It’s not that they don’t know what they are talking about. They are changing it on the facts. That is the idea. In the past, there was a push to get them to be more political and they pushed back saying, "We are not going to make a political piece out of this. We are going to follow a thread of numbers, facts and reporting information." Whether it’s to talk about COVID or other subjects, it’s very difficult. It sounds like you had some interaction with people who were reaching out to people on the internet to find out what their take was on COVID testing.

I have very close friends I have been friends with for years since grade school. There are five of us and we communicate daily. We have a Facebook Messenger group. It is a private group for us to communicate with. It started before the pandemic. We connected a lot during the pandemic as we were all on lockdown. Several of us have been talking about buying at-home or rapid testing kits. A lot of us have been buying them. Some of us live on the East Coast, West Coast, and the one in particular lives in Texas. The one from Texas said, “I’m genuinely curious. I’m not trying to be Barbie, but why all the concern over testing?” He lives in South Texas and COVID is not a thing there or the perception is it’s not a thing.

Certain parts of the country and cities have limited impact. Their hospitals aren’t that full. They are not having a high death rate in their county or hospital. It’s barely reaching the radar screen.

There are other states where the hospitals are being overrun. The healthcare workers are exhausted and mentally unstable because of everything they are seeing on a daily basis. Understandably so, that is not a criticism. Different people within the group were explaining, “My mother is elderly. My father is elderly. My grandson who is too young to be vaccinated is asthmatic. My mother-in-law had breast cancer surgery.” Many people wanted to have some safety and protection for their family members or themselves, being one of them is asthmatic as an adult, and getting COVID. They may be compromised in some way even if vaccinated.

Having the testing and knowing that it’s safe to gather with family members on Christmas or New Year’s or not. Certain members of the family tested positive over the holidays, and so they did not get together with extended family for wanting to make sure they were protecting their family members and not putting them at risk. This was the perspective that the majority of us in the chat group expressed in a very civil and respectful way to our friend who lives in Texas. The friend who lives in Texas was appreciative of understanding that because he didn’t have that perspective.

I appreciate you bringing up the word perspective. Our perspective and perception have limitations to us as human beings because one of the things that we quest for is certainty. We also quest for predictability. From that, we quest for safety. Truth is after those. We are not looking for truth first. We are not trying to figure out which truth is best. We are not doing that. Truth can be situational. Ask any 7-year-old or 15-year-old, “I went out because I'm connecting with my friends, so what if there is alcohol at the party, drugs or driving in a car. I am doing it because I'm connecting with my friends. How could you as a parent, prevent me from connecting with my friends?” The truth is not even on the list. 

I’m going like, “I’m going for safety and protection for you.” “I was safe.” Regrettably, our adult mind has not matured into a perspective for many people. We don’t have a perspective of what our emotions are following. Our emotions are following things like certainty, stability and protection. Some people are driven by choice, freedom or identity. Ask anybody that puts a sports jersey on. They are driven by identity, “Go Chiefs. Go Rams. Go Chargers. Go Steelers.” They are driven by the identity of the team and any other team is the enemy.

Who won the latest game is how I feel that week. I watched the Monday Night Football Game. The poor Browns lost to the Steelers. They had a rough season. They lost, but in 2021, they kicked the Steelers butt in the playoffs instead of back end in the first quarter but nobody remembers that. Why aren’t they getting credit for that game? It’s because this game was the most important for the home team Steelers. In 2021, it was the Browns gloating. In 2022, it’s not because of injuries and the offensive line. I’m dragging our discussion into a sports analysis.

In the political analysis, how do we talk about having protection and consideration of others regarding a health crisis? Whereas another group is going like, “I want freedom and choice to go to whatever restaurant I want. I don’t want to wear a mask and get vaccinated.” Some people are in the act of defiance because of their need for freedom and choice. Some people are in the act of, “I don’t have truth if it works and it doesn’t work 100% of the time, so I’m not taking it because it only works 90% of the time.” That logic always gets me a little bit because this is not full logic.

I don’t understand how people can be so dismissive of others and not understand that wearing a mask in a public situation may protect other people from getting sick. I couldn’t understand some of that logic or the disbelief and some people saying, “Coronavirus is a control mechanism of the Democrats to control our lives to have power.” You have explained to me the needs of this other side and how to have compassion for them and that was illuminating for me.

I could have compassion for that person that says the sentence, “The Democrats are controlling this thing.” They are invested into an identity and a belief structure that has been built up inside them that has either a very smaller or a medium-sized truth to it as many things do, but it’s not fully the big picture. The big picture is that people are sick and dying. What kind of people? People who are older, obese, sick with pre-existing conditions. Those people are vulnerable. Certain kids are vulnerable. The ones that have those respiratory asthmatic things. One of my clients who has an asthmatic kid is terrified because their kid could be in that hospital on a respirator.

They go, "I'm not losing my seven-year-old." He gets pissed at anyone that brings up things like, "You are going to put my seven-year-old at risk because you don't want to wear a mask? Is that what you are doing over there?" "Yeah, but it doesn't matter." "You are still going to put my seven-year-old at risk?" He gets on fire on this. His perception and perspective are based on the awareness and consciousness of him sitting with the thing he could lose that is precious to him. The other person is not sitting with that.

What is interesting to me is you are helping me see that the person who is very cavalier about COVID or very dismissive who is maybe anti-vaccine or certainly anti-mask, and not taking this the way others do is because they have a different need. I didn’t understand that need. They are placing that need above the value of someone else’s health.

“That need is not in my top 10 or top 5, therefore, I don’t care about that need.”

The need has not anything to do with health and safety on its face. It’s a different kind of protection.

Human beings will protect and fight for an idea or identity to death. People will raise a flag because they value it and fight to the death because of that flag. They are going to do it because they value it. There are people who have fought for abortion rights and trying to overturn those to the death, and have caused death to others through exercising their beliefs and value about a woman’s right to choose because they are fighting for the baby’s right to choose and they are valuing life. It’s a hard discussion to have. How do you value life? When is murder a murder? That is where they come from.

It is one of the most difficult debates in human existence in America that continues over time.

There are so many things that human beings are not required to process on a daily basis. From a governmental or business standpoint, why tell them? They are going to be upset and they can’t do anything about it. You and I were talking beforehand about the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Thirteen days before there were missiles launched between Cuba, Russia and America, how are we going to pull this off and avoid this whole missile thing? How are we going to do that?

The public had no awareness.

They had no awareness or consciousness that it was going on. Is that a conspiracy? Was there transparency? The answer is, "Why?" "So they could be ready." "Ready for what?" "So the nuclear bomb doesn't land on their head." It's very difficult. It's how do we keep our rational mindset around and go like, "It's not a good choice. It's the Cubans, Russians and Americans getting together and going like, “We are going to take a pass on being violent to each other. We are going to trust that America is not going to invade or overturn us as they tried before," which is what the Cubans needed to do.

They tried it and it didn’t work or they didn’t try hard enough when they did it.

What is the fight for? How can we get the fight to take place in an above-the-board fashion? America has had a good run of trying to work through its issues. This is the problem of our generation. One of them is how do we deal with the pandemic? That is one of the problems that we have.

It was quite something to me when I realized that there is an awful lot of Americans that place that protection of an idea, identity or value of freedom or independence, not wanting to have a mandate put on them. They are protecting themselves from those things at the expense of other people’s health. That was unsettling to me. When you understand where their need is coming from, at least it helps you understand why. It doesn’t make me happy that they are doing it.

It is not a happy choice because it is not in the spirit of collaboration and cooperation. It is unsettling, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Why is that sentence not in front of us on a daily basis? Can we remember that thing? Let’s go and remember that. Any politician who wants to take that up and say, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Bring on your conflict. Any politician that would like to step into that arena and claim that sentence as their own and say, “I’ll debate anybody on your Democratic or Republican values. Bring it right in front of us. I’m happy to talk about it because united we stand, divided we fall.”

We need to find some form of commonplace not, "I'm right. You're wrong. Shut up." That is where we are. The answer is a lot of folks are in that space. It is one of the struggles we have as a nation because we don't deal with mistakes well. Mistakes move into a category of guilt and shame way too early, instead of it being a mistake. It's like, "You just made a mistake. You don't have to feel guilt or shame about it." How about disappointment? I feel disappointed that I didn’t pick you up, rather than guilt and shame that I didn’t pick you up. Does it need to escalate all the way through?

That is one of the challenges. We have escalated our language. We have lost perspective and perception about how to deal with differences and upsets. We don’t have a perspective on that. Our politicians are under-skilled on both sides of the aisle. They are under-skilled about communicating differences and navigating through the experience. Having a little bit of honesty and start to get back where we can have a gentle trust that this group of scientists at the CDC are doing their best to set some guidelines based on some facts they are gathering and that they may change those guidelines as things get better.

Not because they lied to us, they didn’t have the information a few months or the information changed or the virus changed. We are trusting the scientists who measure the virus. It’s a stretch for things like certainty and trust. They struggle there. Whether it’s in business, politics or personal life, the gentle adjustment of our perception and perspective can make a difference.

Something else that we talked about is the CDC changing their guidelines on how long you should isolate if you have been exposed from 10 to 5 days. From a certain perspective, people can say, “They are changing the guidelines based on the good information they have now. The information they had in the past was different. It required ten days. Now, either the state of the coronavirus variant or better data now from years of dealing with this virus, they say, “You only need to isolate for five days.” That is one perspective. The other perspective is, “The government doesn’t know what they are doing. They should have had these five days all along. They have been making us do ten days. We can’t trust them. We don’t even need to isolate at all.”

That is a perfect example of that mindset of, “We can’t trust this group of people. We can’t trust the government.” That disarray is the unraveling of certainty and trust that creates division. Once you start down the path of creating the division, all of a sudden, people look like enemies that are not enemies. They look like they are fighting for something, but they don’t agree with 90% of the things that you don’t agree with.

It is very difficult to battle that. The truth doesn’t matter at some point there.

You are undermining confidence in creating doubt and skepticism for short-term gain. In sales and marketing, if you create doubt and skepticism inside the listener, they will stop purchasing one product and start purchasing another product because they start to trust this other product. If I create doubt and skepticism about Democrats because they weren’t able to move the needle on some issues, and this other person promises you they are going to move the issue because they are a businessman, they are going to mix it up, “I’m outside the system. I know how to run these things. I have a big company.”

The answer is you are out of your element, but the person believes it. People believe and still believe that Donald Trump is a great leader. We have to have empathy and compassion for that belief because he sold it to them. This is not political. There are all kinds of folks. Is Nancy Pelosi the strongest messenger that we can have as human beings? No. Does she miss a third of the time? Yes. Is she sympathetic to others? Yes. Is she empathetic? No. That part is hard.

As a communication show, there is some hope. When we start adjusting our perception and perspective, we gain more awareness and consciousness about how to respond to people that are upset. Also, how to deal with some of these difficult issues, which is how do we care for each other by wearing a mask in social settings? Let that sentence live in social settings. No one is making you do anything other than you choosing to care for others.

That is a nice way to frame it because then the person thinks, “I have the freedom to not wear a mask, but if I don’t wear it, I don’t care for you. I’m essentially an asshole.”

I know one thing for sure that I’m coming out of the pandemic with, whether I get COVID or not. In the future, whenever I get a cold, I will be wearing a mask until that cold is over. Hands down, I know that is true because I’m going to consider others. Before the pandemic, I don’t give a shit. I’m walking around sniffing and my whole house gets sick with a cold. What the hell am I doing that for? What I know now is that I want to consider the well-being of my family. They do not have to get this cold and go through what I did. To build their immunity? Why? Let them catch a cold on their own if they happen to get it. At least I’m doing my part for the protection and consideration of their wellbeing. I’m going to stay home more often if I have a cold. I will wear a mask at the grocery store if I have a cold.

It is going to create a new normal. I’m thinking about my children in middle school and grade school. I’m like, “Where is your mask? You got to bring it to where we are going.” It is not even, “I don’t want to wear a mask.” Now it is like, “Okay, mask. I got it.” It’s like putting on your seatbelt.

It is going to turn into a seatbelt situation to prevent colds, outbreaks and stuff like that. There are certain cold viruses that are less contagious that will not survive because human beings are doing their part to protect the spread of it in a city or in a work environment. There are certain countries that do a great job about, “You are sick. Stay home. You don’t come to work and infect everybody at work.”

Some other countries like Germany have that mindset. They are going like, “You are sick. You come back with a doctor’s letter. If you are cleared, then we are letting you back in this place because otherwise, you are not getting this whole place sick and then you are going to kill our productivity of the business.” How about that as a standard? “You stay homesick,” is what your manager will say to you. “You are sick,” not “You are sick. You are making it up to take a mental health day.” Stay home.

This is a way to consider this topic about how do we listen and process the amount of information. It’s to be able to talk through it like this and stick the landing on what need are we going for and how can we best make a decision from that perspective. Also, have empathy and compassion for the other person’s position. That will go better.

It allows us to have a civil discourse, an adult conversation and not hate each other. That is what we need more of in America, where people live and work.

Let’s see if we can dial down the outrage.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, everybody, for reading.