For starters, where did you get your world? That's right, I'm asking you where your idea of what the world is like came from. It had to come from somewhere. Have you ever wondered where you got it? Those of us who read many diaries here must share some aspects of our world.
There are a few words in our vocabulary that bear on this question. For example, truth, reality, and objectivity. I assume these are words you would like to associate with your world. That's not as easy as you might think. Part of understanding your world is understanding how you get information. Through your senses right? But then what? What happens to these words we read here, for example? Do they mean the same thing to everyone?
Read on below because I want to "pull your chain".
There are many ways to change the world. The most available method is to change your model of it. You do have a model. That model, in fact, determines the "meaning" you give to all incoming sensory data. That's a red flag! The sensory data is only as good as the model you use to process it. At this point you may be ready to deny that all this happens. That is understandable because the conscious mind is highly over rated. No, you do not do these things consciously. Since you were a baby your brain, in ways we still understand very incompletely, gathered incoming data , arranged it, and assembled a world for you.
If you still are having doubts, explain why different people give different meaning to the same sensory data. Are some lying? That is possible but it does not account for most of what we know to be the case.
Long ago we came up with methods to try to get to the root of this. Science is the most well known. Yet even scientists have problems with this issue. Many scientists believe in "objectivity" which roughly means that it is possible, if you are very careful, to find methods for insuring that you process sensory data with as little input from your mind added to it as possible. In some cases we can get pretty close. In most we only add to the self deception contained in this process. Since we need a model already in our brain to process sensory data there is really no such thing as "objectivity", only differing degrees of subjectivity. There is an irony here for the more you believe it is possible to be "objective" the more likely it is that you are capable of self deception. That's why "good" scientists are so skeptical of everything. They are aware of the dangers of being too certain about their world.
Then there is politics. A sloppy definition of politics is "The art of the possible". Have you ever told a lie and gotten away with it? (Rhetorical question. How do you know when you lie to yourself, for example?). Have you ever insisted that you were telling the truth and later found out that you were mistaken? Then there is magic and there are other forms of illusions. Good salespersons know how to make customers want things and this can be misused to making the want exist whether they need the thing or not.
This whole complex scenario is what politics seems to be all about. It seems clear that once one assumes a set of "values" one begins to try to construct a world compatible with those values. If one can not manipulate the events in the world out there one can certainly interpret them in different way. We all know all about Faux News, for example. Often the events themselves can be manipulated as long as the audience is not privy to the sensory experience directly.
I was motivated to write this because the world I see out there is being manipulated to an extent that I never remember in my 79 years here on the planet. I spent my life doing science and studying the workings of the human mind. I think I gained some understanding. The problem is that understanding is not comforting. It is actually quite scary. Even science itself is replete with these problems and our present human condition suffers from our failure to understand ourselves and what our minds actually do.
My title may be a tad misleading because it makes changing our world sound too easy. First you have to be willing to change yourself because that is where it really happens. That is tough. First you have to see yourself and the context in which you are doing the seeing. I'll be blunt. You will not be able to do that until you step out of that context. Peeling away the layers of unconscious frames you have used to make your world is painful. It requires an acceptance that the whole package might be built on beliefs you never identified as beliefs. That is the ultimate existential risk. Once you leap you do not know where you will land.
Is this all necessary? I think so. We have made a mess of our world. The future is very bleak. The political scene is a diversion that prevents the solution of problems rather than facilitating it. Yet we cling to the illusion that if we reverse Citizens United and if we elect more democrats and if this and if that maybe we can make some progress. Is this sane? Can you rationalize this? Can you look your kids in the eye and tell them you know what to do to save them from what is coming?
You have lots more choices than you are willing to admit. The climate deniers are not the worst deniers. It is the vast majority of us who are on the side of the good guys and are struggling to make things better. They are not getting better. What will you do about that? Try harder? How hard can you try? No, I'm sorry, some changes are needed and needed soon. I can not tell you what they are but I can be sure what we are doing now is not working.