The truth lies in the sixth ‘O’ of Goooooooooooooooogle
We
live in a world of claims. Look around you. You are being greeted by
countless ‘I am this, that and the other’ signs. Corporate entities,
political parties, politicians, do-gooders, faith healers, tuition
masters, meditation gurus, film makers, playwrights, rights advocates
and others are smiling at you, aren’t they? And aren’t they all telling
you what to do and why you should believe that they know what’s best for
you?
Open a newspaper. It’s all claims. It is all, ‘I will do this’ or ‘I
can’, ‘I alone can’, ‘buy me’, ‘I am the best value for your money in
the market’ etc. These claims don’t come with disclaimers that are worth
that tag. They don’t come with references to objecting opinion. They are
definite. They are the I-know-alls that crowd our lives, make us punier
than we are and worse, persuade us to join the claiming bandwagon. It’s
a claim or perish kind of world that we inhabit.
Am
I painting a dismal picture? Depends. I see claim and I take refuge, as
I frequently do, in the incomparable wisdom of Siddhartha Gauthama, the
Buddha, the Enlightened One, who too claims, but discourages blind
faith, recommending instead the application of intellect, the
cultivation of compassion and disavowal of ego which un-clutter the
inquiring mind and persuades us to come to our own conclusion:
‘Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon
tradition; nor upon rumour; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon
surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias
towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming
ability; nor upon the consideration, “The monk is our teacher.” Kalamas,
when you yourselves know: “These things are good; these things are not
blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and
observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,” enter on and
abide in them.’ (Anguttara Nikaya III.65 - Kalama Sutta).
Consequently, when I see ‘claim’, I ask some questions. ‘What is the
source?’ I ask myself. Is the source reliable? Is claim verifiable in
these and other ways? If any of the worthies who are spitting venom at
Sri Lanka regarding impropriety in war-conduct had intellects endowed
with such inquiring preamble, they would dump the report that the ICG
(International Crisis Group) is passing around as though it was written
by an omniscient entity as unadulterated rubbish, but that’s another
issue altogether.
I believed, I confess, that technology had made
claim-lie-and-get-away tough. I was thinking of the Internet. Then I
learned that it is not as innocent and free or as accessible as one
might think. In the first place, one has to know what one should be
looking for. Ok, we need to know some English too, not ‘conversational’
English, but enough to know how to spell certain words, technical terms
and most importantly, names, brands and corporate entities.
Even this is not enough. I was told recently that if you wanted
information about quitting smoking, there’s tons of information but your
search is filtered in ways that you might have no clue about. It is
possible that if you know the correct key words, to get through these
irritants, but that requires previous reading, long searches in
different knowledge-spaces, the perusal of journals and the listening to
expert. But wait, did I say ‘journal’ and ‘expert’? Are they value-free,
are they independent and even if they are, to what degree? Isn’t it true
that things have prices and people too have value-tag?
Check the Internet for information about quitting smoking and then do
what most don’t, i.e. check owner and source, the verifiability and
validity. I got an answer that astounded me. The first 50 entries for a
particular search based on particular key words were all linked directly
or indirectly to the tobacco industry! In other words, even the
‘opposition’ is ‘managed’, the perpetrator decides to a large extent the
dimensions of your escape options.
Journals. We like to think that academics are pure, that they are
objective and are ‘above board’. Here’s news. Wyeth, one of the top
pharmaceutical companies in the world (now a division of Pfizer), it has
been revealed, has used ghostwriters to place over 40 ‘scientific’
articles in medical journals! Yes, we know that a lot of ‘medical
research’ is funded by the drug industry, but when the ‘findings’ are
doctored (bad word, yes) to mislead, there’s something terribly wrong.
‘In July of 2009, a U S District Court Judge granted the motion to
make discovery materials that were part of an on-going lawsuit public.
These papers supporting the use of Premproand other derivatives of
the Premarin family of drugs written by non-accredited writers were then
“authored” by medical academics. What is most disturbing is that these
ghostwritten articles “emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the
risks” of using hormone replacements.
Equally alarming is that this type of marketing strategy is routinely
used by pharmaceutical manufacturers to establish credibility for new
and existing drugs while distorting scientific fact.’ We need to keep in
mind that these are corporate entities that have lots of money.
What they have to pay the few people needed to write web copy and
design web pages to guarantee a high hit rate and privileged access
position in web searches is peanuts. All the more reason for us to be
extra vigilant, don’t you think?
We are lazy, though. We type some words on the search box in
www.google.com and press the ‘enter’ key. We click on the top most
entry. We think we are getting authoritative knowledge. Think again.
This is a claim world, remember? You might as well click randomly, about
6 O’s from your left in the ‘gooooooogle’ line at the bottom of the
site.
There are no guarantees of course. Our innocence has been exploited.
Faith in ‘experts’ and ‘expertise’ has blinded us. That which appears
liberating is often nothing more than a thoughtfully crafted avenue of
deceit. It is good to question though. Good to revisit ‘authority’, put
it under the magnifying glass of reason. Just as The Buddha recommended.
There’s no substitute to this.
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