Bad info

While reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, a phrase gave me pause. It wasn’t about the core topics of that book, but it struck me nonetheless. About halfway through the book, the character Wei Cheng is talking of a time he spent at a Buddhist temple, and there he saw pilgrims that “seemed to be in a state of numbness, their intellect inhibited.” The concision of the phrase “intellect inhibited” hit me. It wasn’t the first time I appreciated the writing, and the translation by Ken Liu, but when I read that, I stared off, and pondered it, and thought about how that has been apt for me at various points in my life, and it seems quite accurate to describe a segment of America right now.

Watching Fox News means choosing to inhibit your intellect. Why do people do that? Why would people choose to inhibit themselves like that? It seems to me that the best answer is that the truth is hard to bear, especially if it does not conform to your pre-existing biases. I think being smart can be quite hard in general compared to being medium or being dumb, but I have a particular POV on that, which is my pre-existing bias. Truth and intellect as a cause of pain has probably always been a thing. Thinking people over the centuries have turned to drugs to numb their brains. Is the new addictive way to inhibit intellect any different?

LDS people will abstain from drugs because, um, drugs are bad. And by that I am suggesting, frankly, that little effort is made by Mormons to use that restriction as an exemplar or jumping-off point to consider any connection between the Word of Wisdom and the willful inhibition of the intellect. Mormons are great at knowing the do’s and don’ts of the Word of Wisdom, and what you can get away with, and most Mormons ultimately just follow those rules, and it’s less common to ponder the rules and write mini-essays about them and draw conclusions about inhibited intellects. Also, we are champions at sweeping things under the rug, which has long been our favorite form of inhibiting the intellect.

That said, a prior generation of Mormons made pins¹ for the Mutual Improvement Association, which is what the youth-focused area of the church was once called, and they emblazoned those pins with “The Glory of God Is Intelligence” — and that phrase still gives me hope. That phrase has been an important one in LDS culture. That aspiration is still there, so maybe the intellectually inhibited will diminish in prominence again someday. Hopefully, they will be outnumbered by those who seek Truth, and the seeking might in some way be tied to the fact that it makes them free, i.e., not inhibited.

Meanwhile, America and all of humanity needs to stay cautious against the growth of false news through lying humans and the increasingly many bots controlled by liars.

Do your part. Avoid mutual deterioration associations. Avoid bad info. Don’t watch F News.