Unf*ck Yourself, Unf*ck the World. Kagiso Msimango
yet deciding that you know a lot more than you do can get you stuck up shit creek without a paddle, as the Scots so elegantly put it.
Do not take as gospel any information that has been transmitted to you by someone else, especially when there is a lot at stake. Our information ecology is polluted. Never before in our history have we had so much access to information, and yet the vast majority of information to which we have access is shared by people, corporations, governments and institutions with agendas that are often opposed, to varying degrees, to our wellbeing. People tend to believe that just because pretty much anyone can publish information now, the playing field is level. This is untrue and naïve. You may start a YouTube channel that never goes beyond 10 views, even if you have valuable quality information, and Kanye West can start an account for his hamster and it will get the exposure you crave because, thanks to fame and money, he is more influential than you. You may discover a cure for cancer that is cheap and readily available to most, but you don’t have the resources that Big Pharma has. I am likely to find your discovery on page 15 of my Google search because you probably don’t know much about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or even if you do, all the keywords that matter are already owned by the current big players in the cancer field. Whether you like it or not, most of the information that ends up finding you has significant resources behind it, and the reason that most organisations invest a lot of resources into making sure their information reaches you is because they want to influence your perceptions and therefore your behaviour. These are not your friends; they aren’t sharing anything with you for the fun of it. They are investing in a particular return.
Most of these information sources aren’t evil, but because their own wellbeing is naturally more important to them than yours, they will manipulate the information they give you to favour them. This manipulation ranges from outright lies of commission, to lies of omission and cherry picking information, to people who don’t even know that they are being untruthful. I came across a pub named The Office. The owner told us that he named the pub such so that his patrons could truthfully say to their wives, “Honey, I am going to be home late. I am still at The Office.”
If you go to a market that promises goods at the lowest prices, you are probably there because you want to spend as little money as possible, yet none of the vendors are likely to say, “Well, you know, as cheap as this item is, I put a 150% mark-up on it, and if you drive three blocks in that direction you can get it even cheaper from my supplier.” This is not an evil person. It is just a man who wants to feed his family; that is his agenda, and your agenda, to get these goods as cheaply as possible, is not in 100% harmony with his, so he won’t volunteer this information.
The world is full of information corrupted by agendas in varying degrees. In a competitive environment, whether you are competing for money, power or any other resource, the manipulation of information can give you an advantage. It is normal, not usually sinister, but it can and often does get sinister.
I remember attending a talk on integrative medicine and one of the speakers, a medical doctor, said something that gave me the chills. She said that medical professionals often say, “There is no cure for your illness,” rather than, “We don’t have a cure for your illness”, and that small difference in phrasing will often influence whether the patient investigates other routes to deal with their condition or not. It reminded me of a story a friend once shared. She was on chronic meds to support a weakness in her heart, medication she was told she’d have to be on for the rest of her life. Ironically, her weakened heart was a result of some other chronic medication she was taking for a different condition. She started practising breathwork religiously and, at her annual check-up about a year later, the cardiologist was astounded to discover that her heart was fine and she no longer required medication. She excitedly started sharing with him how she’d fixed her heart. He put his hand up, a gesture to stop her talking, and informed her that he didn’t want to know. I understand why he stopped her in her tracks. As a cardiologist with education, experience, skills and a livelihood invested in what he does, he wouldn’t be particularly keen to know how some woman who writes copy for a living healed herself from an “incurable” heart condition. Most of the time people, and institutions (which are really made up of people) have an agenda when they share information. The quality of the conclusions you make based on this data is affected by how privy you are to the underlying agenda.
The parent who lies about the ice-cream truck probably doesn’t want to get up off the couch to chase after a stupid van in the sun, every single Sunday when the truck drives past, so he or she simply lies. A wilful lie of commission. Perhaps the cardiologist, someone who is viewed as knowing all there is to know about heart health, may come across other patients with a similar condition to the one my friend had and may continue to tell them that he doesn’t know how to cure it, only how to manage it with chronic meds. He will be telling the truth because he refused to find out whatever my friend had wanted to share with him.
Then you get those who are unwitting agents of someone else’s agenda. The poor boy who missed all those opportunities to fill his little belly with soft-serve because of what daddy told him, tells his younger sister, truthfully, that when the ice-cream truck plays music it means it has run out of ice cream. He is being honest, but what he is sharing is not the truth – only the truth as he sees it.
There is a very disturbing story about a multinational corporation that had to pay millions of dollars in class-action suits. Starting in the 1960s, this organisation went to poor villages in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and convinced poor and uneducated mothers that formula was much healthier than breastmilk. They trained “foot soldiers” from these communities, who were trusted locals, to espouse the virtues of their baby milk formula. These mothers were advised to stop breastfeeding and give their babies formula exclusively. This company would donate to the mother a couple of months’ worth of free formula that would last long enough for her to stop producing breastmilk, with strict instructions not to breastfeed the baby at all. But breastmilk works on supply and demand – if you reduce how much you breastfeed, you start producing less milk. If you stop breastfeeding entirely, you stop lactating completely within a few weeks. This organisation tricked these mothers into drying up their milk supply. By the time the women ran out of formula, the formula was no longer free. The mothers had no choice but to buy it, because they were no longer lactating. This company was only interested in maximising shareholder value and had zero fucks to give about the wellbeing of these women and their children. The organisation continues to thrive to this day, and I am confident that you still consume at least one of its numerous products, ranging from chocolates and cereals to infant nutrition products. If you want to find out who they are, I have given you enough information for you to type all the right words into a Google search. Unfortunately, their story is not that unusual. The locals who pushed this agenda for the multinational didn’t know that they were agents for such a horrific agenda, similar to soldiers who lose their minds, limbs or lives in wars thinking they are fighting for one thing, while the war is really about something else entirely.
It gets even messier, friend.
Sometimes information can be misleading – even when it is all true. A great example is how often people disregard natural, organic medicines and assume that pharmaceutical drugs are superior, based on the availability of clinical research. In biotechnology you can patent a synthetic molecule, but you cannot get a patent on a natural molecule, because it was made by Mother Nature, not in your lab. Most companies in the industry are not owned by benevolent philanthropists who want to save the world; they are there to make money, so they don’t bother doing much research on what they won’t be able to patent and therefore profit from. As a result, most of the research in the field is on synthetic molecules. Thus, many intelligent, rational people are inclined to believe that pharmaceutical meds are more effective and/or reliable based on the fact that there is significantly more clinical research on them than there is on herbs and plants. So we make the wrong inference based on the availability of information, or lack thereof. One such instance that tickles me is of how one organisation continues to mislead people without actually lying. This particular brand of cosmetics was founded by a woman who strongly valued the idea of sustainable business practices and doing no harm. Among other factors, the company did not test their products on animals. Their stores and packaging had large visible displays declaring, “Our products are not tested