Making sense of America’s newest Guild… Again (Part 2) “How Did We Even Get Here?”

Today is Episode 2 of our 5‑part series based on my book Making Sense of America’s Newest Guild… Again: What I Discovered in My Search for Answers.

How in the world did we get here?

How did America get to a place where its people often throw logic out with the trash, slap on labels instead of name badges, evict truth for narrative, and cheer the ease of parroting for the character building of critical thinking? How did we get to a place where we no longer talk to each other but instead talk past each other?

Let’s begin with a story…again.

One day a man walked into a shop to buy a new pair of glasses. He walked around for a bit, then found a pair he thought he might like. When he put them on, he looked around and, astonished, said, “Everything is still blurry.”

The clerk approached the man and said, “Sir, those are sunglasses that you are wearing.”

The man replied, “Oh. Well. At least that explains why I can’t see with clarity and why everything looks so dark.”

The clerk said, “Yes. That’s because you are looking at the world through the wrong lens.”

What lens are you looking through?

We are all wearing them. Some of us are wearing lenses that are tinted, some are scratched up, some are smeared, some are bifocals, some were handed down by our parents, some were given to us by our teachers, some were mandated by our political leaders, some were trademarked by our favorite news station or anchor, and some were traded for the next viral pair promoted by some person on social media.

So, again, what lens are you looking through?

In my book Making Sense of America’s Newest Guild… Again, I talk about something that I heard someone explain really well—the idea of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis.

Simply put: the thesis is “what is”; the antithesis is “what someone wants it to be”; and the synthesis is what becomes the “new normal.”

With this process, a person, culture, society, and even a nation can be reshaped over and over again until it is no longer recognizable as it was and often can no longer remember or care what it once was. Over a period of time, the original thesis gets buried under piles of “new normals” until the “new normal” no longer resembles the original foundation and no one remembers what the original was.

This is a proven system for how societies shift, cultures drift, integrity disappears, and freedoms and liberties erode. As I wrote in that book, “Death by a thousand cuts.” This may not always be done intentionally or with malice, but it is always effective.

We all have filters through which we view the world. We have a worldview filter, political filter, cultural filter, emotional filter, and the most prominent among the youth, the “I already know everything” filter.

As I wrote in the book, "What you learn from any institution or place of learning is typically in line with what those in charge want you to know.”

This does not mean that everything they teach is a lie, but it does mean that everything should be tested and verified by yourself.

A big problem we see now-a-days is the outsourcing of critical thinking… well, thinking in general. People tend to outsource their thinking to their favorite news source or anchor, their favorite politician, their political party’s current platform, their favorite celebrity, a popular influencer on social media, and the list could go on. They then call it "research."

But as I wrote in that book: “Without due diligence and independent research, you only know what you were told to know.”

Remember, if one can control what you are allowed or able to learn—that is, what you “know”—then they can control what you believe, which will control how you act; they will control you. That’s not thinking; that’s programming; that is very close to indoctrination.

So, how did we get here in America?

The answer might be as simple as this: We stopped talking, listening, questioning, and verifying, and most importantly, we stopped thinking. We traded the ability to think critically for the easier path of outsourcing. We traded reason for emotional reaction.

By now, you might be asking, "What do we do?" First we acknowledge the obvious: we can view the same thing and come to differing conclusions. And that’s okay.

The problem isn’t disagreement.

The problem is the refusal to understand. When we outsourced our critical thinking, we lost our understanding.