I was talking with my Dad not long ago who is in his 70s. I love my Dad and I have a lot of respect for how intelligent he is. He’s always thought about things from a many different angles and I’ve always appreciated his willingness to consider viewpoints that were different from his.
I noticed though that talking with him about world events has become increasingly difficult over the last several years. I realized that it is because we are getting our information about these events from different sources.
My Dad has always gotten his information about world events through the main stream media outlets. Like for everyone in his generation (and mine until recently) it took a lot of effort to get any information that wasn’t coming through a major corporation.
His persistence in continuing this practice though has made his knowledge base and thus his perspective drastically different than mine about what’s going on in the world now.
So it got me to think about exactly how the news media has used it’s monopolies to provide information to the masses and what impact that has had on people and our world so far. I was also really curious about what could happen if everyone began to see through the limitations of using only the main stream news to get our information from.
Studies in neuroscience have found that the human brain is always asking 3 fundamental questions:
1) What do I focus on?
2) What does it mean?
3) What do I do?
These questions are obvious survival questions and help us quickly assess a situation and take action.
In the last 100 years or so though our culture has outsourced the process of answering these basic questions to news media outlets run by a few major corporations owned by even fewer people.
This has allowed these people to disempower millions if not billions of others by providing answers to these questions that give us little to no access to our own resources.
Watch any main stream news show and see if you don’t always find that they provide the following 3 answers:
1) Question: What do I focus on?
Answer: The latest crisis (which is either invented or capitalized on).
2) Question: What does it mean?
Answer: Things are bad and they are completely outside of the realm of your influence.
3) What do I do?
Answer: Live in fear and accept that more of your rights will be taken from you.
When you watch or listen to main stream news with the above answers in mind it’s almost comical. These 3 answers seam to ALWAYS be the same regardless of what the events are.
What if everyone saw through this and stopped outsourcing their survival questions to a few people who provide nothing but disempowering answers?
What could happen if we all begin exploring sources of information that allow us to tap into our own potential and provide answers that we can take action on now?
-Andy
For Music that Transforms Your Possibilities and More, visit: www.AndyHarrisonMusic.com
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