Trust me

 

I'll be upfront with you. I can't seriously tell you that I am an authority on anything. This is problematic as a blogger, because most people look to bloggers to be authorities on something like food, fashion or pest control. I am nothing more than an observer who has spent more than six decades staring in morbid fascination at life. And I suppose I've learned a lesson or two, but I can't say I've mastered anything.

For some reason, people like it when someone states something with great authority, like the earth is flat or there is only one god. It takes a lot of the ambiguity out of things. You don't have to question or think about it. So like a sheep, you can follow blindly and hope the path you are on leads you to the truth or in a sheep's case, food.

But when I studied journalism years ago, we were taught that all "facts" had to be verified by trusted sources. And the more trusted sources you had, the better the chances were that your story was true. Problem is that I don't think there is such a thing as a trusted source. Every institution invents truths to justify their existence and behavior. Let's face it, governments lie, churches lie, celebrities lie and corporations lie. I've spent enough time in marketing to know that something doesn't necessarily have to be true to sell a product or concept. People just have to believe it is true.

So you are really better off taking the position that nothing is true. But trusting nothing does create a very lonely existence. This is why religions turn to faith as the justification for their lies. If you have faith in something, it doesn't have to be true. Even science bases it's truths on failed experiments and elimination of things that don't work. What is left should be the truth, right?

Maybe. Maybe not.

So in conclusion (because I believe every train of though should have a caboose), don't believe anything you read, watch, hear, smell or feel.

Trust me on this.