5 Ways Evolution Killed Truth
Listen at The McFuture Podcast with Steve Faktor at https://www.IdeaFaktory.com

5 Ways Evolution Killed Truth

In 1963, 10 percent of Yale students got A's. In 2012, 62 percent did. Why? Is it because of the $260,000 price tag...or some other reason everyone is suddenly a genius?

What if it's not just education inflating our egos... EVERYTHING is! We wouldn't know the truth if it tried to smother us in our sleep. There are real evolutionary reasons why we're suddenly drowning in "fake news" and a sea of all kinds of lies.

[You can also hear this episode on The McFuture Podcast with Steve Faktor]

Consider our 100% genuine lives...

My Levi's still say they're a ‘36’ – like some time portal back to high school. Wink. Wink.

Or, that $3,000 Chanel bag that screams STATUS!! It screams even louder from your tiny studio with a bathtub in the kitchen.

Everyone knows Little Timmy’s can’t sing, play basketball, or draw. But there’s his wall of trophies and Fridge of Sorrows - stick figure mommy riding a flaming beaver...?

Maybe he’s high. America is the Courtney Love of countries. We know where esteem, courage, and escape really come from: Pfizer. Without antidepressants, how else would Katie stage her daily self-empowerment festival on Facebook? "All bodies are beautiful!" "The sexiest feature is confidence!" "True beauty's got booty!" Great. Let's test that at the bar.

There's so much more.

Ads disguised as lives on Instagram and Bravo.

Bodies doctored by...doctors and Photoshop.

Days at the office spent "curating" "authentic" "influencers" - pretending anyone, ever, wanted to "engage with brands."

Employee self-assessments that make dumb PowerPoints sound like heart transplants. And bosses and HR types who pretend to care about your 'career development' while clearly protecting company interests.

Then, there's "fake news" and crackpot conspiracies...

But is falling for “fake news” that different from cherry-picking real news to reinforce our fake realities? Or, our constant state of fake #outrage. Or, the mindless Buzzfeed advertorials and Refinery29 quizzes we share like e-Bola? Then, buy their shiny, little cures.

I haven't read a science book in 20 years. But my Facebook page says I f****ng love science! I don't even click on the links. Like, like, like!! Science is so easy! I love it! No, I f****ing love it!!

You'd think our f***ng love of science would smother pseudo-science in its sleep. Not so much. Vaccines cause autism! GMO kills! Coffee cures cancer! Pot cures everything else!! The earth is flat! It's no wonder why. Scientific studies have become like Bible passages - you can find one to support whatever you think the facts should be. Thanks, Corporate Funding! And, laughable academic research system.

What’s Really Happening?

We are witnessing America's transition from facts to feelings.

Perception and reality haven't been this far apart since Dear Leader Kim Jong Un defeated the wizards at Dumbledore.

The further we drift from reality, into this sea of feelings, the more defiant we become in our truth. After all, our identity depends on it. It has to be true. So every product, every tweet, every opinion, must reaffirm that identity; give it us meaning.

If only there were some other historical example of people clinging to - and fighting over - unprovable dogmas... Possibly, a lesson we could learn.... Can't think of one... Nope, not one.

When opinions and whole identities - are based on feelings, not facts – on the supernatural, not the observable – there's no foundation for debate or compromise. Everyone occupies a fantasy world they choose.

The Thinker is on life support. Long live The Feeler! The Believer! The Belieber!

[Don't forget to listen to this + other great episodes on The McFuture Podcast with Steve Faktor]

5 Reasons Why This is Happening

Our newfound irrationality has perfectly rational explanations. It's evolutionary.

  1. The stakes have never been lower. Basically, we won. For the first time in history, we're safe from extreme weather, plagues, and invading Mongolians. Food is dirt cheap and arrives on Styrofoam, just like Mother Monsanto intended. In the old world, we couldn't afford not to agree - is there a bear in the village or isn't there?? With mortal danger off our to-do list, even America's poorest can finally afford bespoke realities.
  2. Validation deficit. When we were hunting, building, and defending, it was easy to tell who did a good job - they lived! Validation was built-in. Today, more and more of our lives are virtual or abstract. On one hand, yay, Netflix! On the other, PowerPointing, brainstorming, and Photoshopping produce no tangible impact on the world. We don't even see physical money for all our effort. Some numbers show up in an account. Then, some guy hands you Pad Thai in the lobby. This elaborate laundering scheme demands that others validate us. Tell us that what we did mattered to somebody, anybody,.
  3. We're still tribal. We don't rely on communities for physical survival anymore. Much of that has been outsourced to government and industry. Social security, sanitation, police, 401K's. Americans move out of the house by 18 (or run away by 12), but we still crave community. Ever wonder why there's a Chinatown in every major city on Earth? (Even more in China!) We crave the company of others like us. Tribes were always built on need – finding, defending or capturing scarce resources. Or, an irrational love or hate of someone or something – real or imagined. With need gone, all we're left with are the other two. (Don't forget to sign up to the mailing list for a mind-blowing upcoming post/podcast on tribalism!)
  4. Virtual bubbles – Online, it's easier than ever to create tribes and protect our bubbles. Follow who and what you like, then eventually, Facebook, Google, and Amazon will make sure that’s the only world you know. We're all that kid who closes his eyes to hide from the boogeyman. Well, our room is full of boogeymen. Time to look them in the eye.
  5. Education. When Candidate Trump said, "I love the poorly educated," thousands of conspiracy theorists orgasmed. They always suspected the last thing elites want is a bunch of critical thinkers running around. They want dumb, obedient masses buying $90 anti-aging creams with pearl particles. (See my post on comedian George Carlin's take on this.) Conspiracy or not, to channel Candidate Trump, education is a disaster. Even our best schools still churn out obedient little robots for mass-industrial employment...that no longer exists. What they don't teach is how to think critically, be skeptical, solve problems, and resolve conflicts.

Make no mistake, I don't long for the "good old days." They weren't very good, just old. But all our lies and liars are LUXURY GOODS. They're made possible by progress. From "alternative facts" to intolerant #tolerance warriors to lying presidents. We earned EVERY LAST ONE of them. The question is how much more progress can we afford before we're back to those good old days?

Diagnose This

Our luxurious lies demand brutal scrutiny – not of them, but of ourselves.

Just like grocery checkout, travel booking, and music discovery are now up to us, so is finding truth. But it’s not about idiot-proofing the planet, locking away anything that might possibly hurt us. Oh no!!! FAKE NEWS!!! OPEN FIRE!!!! It's about understanding why we’re so easy to manipulate in the first place.

Why do aspirational images, comforting quotes, and half-truths feel so good?

Why do they feed our envy, fears, and biases? Why do we bend to their will? And pacify ourselves with pointless trinkets?

Asking those questions is a great start. Then comes the hard part - clawing our way to the source. Identifying what’s really missing. Is it love? Smarts? Empathy? Community? Open-mindedness? Family? Effort? Motivation? Goals? Friendship? Exercise…? All the questions we're afraid to ask because we won't like what we find.

It's once we find the source of our void, there are unlimited ways to fill it. There’s a “how-to” site, class, or guru for everything. Even collectively, we have the technology and creativity to solve almost any problem. We just need the will – and an honest diagnosis.

We can also take comfort that in that truth is not dead, just wounded. Each new generation is more educated, more intelligent, more democratic, more secular, and more peaceful. That means our bout with Idiocracy is temporary. Much of what we're experiencing is a slow, painful adaptation to our new digital limbs. As economics and culture catch up, we can reminisce about that crazy time we almost became cavemen, again.

If you enjoyed this, like/share and check out The McFuture Podcast + IdeaFaktory newsletter.

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Mini-Bio: Steve Faktor is CEO of IdeaFaktory growth & innovation consultancy and host of The McFuture Podcast, a provocative, funny exploration of a future stuffed with Kardashians but starved for meaning...and vision. Steve is a popular keynote speaker, LinkedIn Influencer, and regularly featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, NPR, Wall Street Journal, among others. Steve is the former head of the American Express Chairman’s Innovation Fund, senior executive at Citi and MasterCard, and Andersen consultant. You can follow him via email newsletterLinkedInFacebook & Twitter.

Sushil Kumar

Co-founder Gharana furniture & furnishing and a prudent Share market trader

5y

Thanks for sharing. Very true, our education today is inflated just to satisfy ego and earn. Education need to give emphasis on critical thinking, skepticism, problem framing and solving.

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John E. McBarron

Career luxury goods sales professional.

7y

This article provides a lot to think about and there are some very interesting comments from readers as well.

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Mark Redwood

Humanistic Gestalt Counsellor BA (Hons) MBACP

7y

Funny and creative look at what is being called "post-truth," I especially love the "I Love f***ing science" page. Although I think Steve takes a bit of a detour, when he says that America is transitioning from facts to feelings. His argument is based upon an enlightenment proposition... that the Universe has an objective reality which can be observed, and that progress is made from ignorance to enlightenment, which means a rational objective (unemotional) view of the world. Which is I think something of a dead end... facts have always contained feelings, it's just that we have spent the last 400 years or so pretending they didn't. I think that asking whether something is true, as though there was an objective place you could stand where you could observe this 'truth', is the wrong question. A better question is "Whose truth is this?" Once you ask this one, you can then start asking, "What purpose does this truth serve?" And that I find is much more enlightening than trying to determine whether something is true, as though this were even possible, which it isn't.

Robert Penning

Retired at Forest Hills Public Schools

7y

Reminds me of Leonard Cohen's somg, The Future.

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Matheus Coltro

Sócio proprietário | Loja da segurança.

7y

Very good, great article. People don't know what is fact or lie anymore

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