A friend recently forwarded me a short story that has probably made its way around the Internet a few times but is nevertheless refreshingly poignant each time I get to read it.
It goes like this:
A young couple moves into a new neighborhood. The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the young woman sees her neighbor hanging the wash outside.
"That laundry is not very clean", she said. "She doesn't know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap."
Her husband looked on, but remained silent.
Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments.
About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband:
"Look, she has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this."
The husband said, "I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows."
The moral of the story was summed up as follows:
And so it is with life... What we see when watching others depends on the purity of the window through which we look ...
(In the interest of fairness, the roles in the story can be switched.)
What fascinates me about the story is that it is so appropriate in this “Information Age” which, unfortunately, is filled with an equal or greater amount of Misinformation – distortion of the truth that is designed to mislead. The Internet has enabled the explosive spread of all types of misinformation, of distorted half-truths and, worst of all, hate speeches – cleverly disguised so that they are not perceived as such, but rather as ‘shocking revelations’, some cross-referenced to external sources to make them appear authentic.
It is easy for anyone with an agenda to put his or her thoughts up on a Blog and it is even easier to forward an email on a topic that is crafted in a way that pushes across a viewpoint that we favor. Very easy and, sadly, too dangerous.
We don’t see or hear the word “propaganda” being used much these days. The specialists prefer the more updated and less derogative term “spin”. Either word means the same thing: publication and dissemination of distorted information with the objective of misleading. In Propaganda and Persuasion, the authors Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell defined it as “the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist”.
Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, once said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it”. A similar quote “A lie told often enough becomes the truth” is attributed to Lenin, the Father of the Soviet Union.
The intent of spin or propaganda is not simply to change your perception. The ultimate goal is to get you to act based on those perceptions. Therein lies the danger of blind faith – believing everything that we read or hear is true WITHOUT taking the time to do some fact finding and weighing the plausibility of the information before us.
Not all of us are born skeptics and we have a natural inclination to believe that other people are, in general, truthful. That perception of honesty is what scammers and con artists base their schemes on. They take an element of truth or fact, embellish it with touches of exaggeration and arrive at a story that is believable to the naive and those who, for one reason or another, need those fabrications to be reality. Look at the supposedly sophisticated individual and institutional investors that put millions of their savings with Bernard Madoff. Look at the billions lost in the supposedly Triple A rated (investment grade) securities based on sub-prime mortgages and over-inflated asset values.
A decade of economic growth tilted our perception on real-estate values and we ignored the probability that an explosive growth in values is unsustainable and is indicative of a bubble. Those who came out against the cuts in interest rates as real estate values became over inflated were decried as doomsayers who are anti-American and anti-business. More spin and lobbying led to loosening of bank regulations and Investment banks were able to take their leverage ratios to uncharted areas, and when that was not enough, moved the risky assets off their balance sheet so that they could go for broke. Unfortunately, they did and had to be bailed out with taxpayers money. What about those bonuses that were paid out of the banks’ so called “profits” before they went bust? The spin they want you to believe is that they earned it and there is no way to for the taxpayers to recover those bonuses – not even if they were based on fraud…?!?!
Beware of the Power of Perception. The only tool against being misled (yet again) is to spend time evaluating the spin and to research the facts.
Bring out that power-washer and clean your window….!!
