In 1958 J. Edgar Hoover wrote a book called Masters of Deceit.  It was about the Communist Party and was a classic for many years. Years later we found out he was a master himself.  Now more and more are Masters of Deceit.  Politicians come to mind.  You have to go to Snopes, PolitiFact or Fact-Check.org for every statement. It is natural to do check out “facts” and statistics  when you don’t agree with them, but I have come to realize that I also have to do it with statements that I want to be true. In my pessimistic moments,  it seems that the only unifying idea in the country right now is that everybody lies!  And when the lies are caught, they argue about whose lies were worse than theirs or they attack the fact checkers.  I found an interesting article when researching this topic: How to Beat the Fact-Checkers. Sub-tittle of the article:  “Politicians have figured it out: When caught in a lie, attack the truth cops.”  It was from 2012 but is even more true today.

The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you can never know if they are genuine. And that brings us to Facebook–the place where the truly gullible post outrageous things.  There are people who make fake church signs.  There are cute pictures with simplistic captions to support an untruth. There are doctored videos.  And don’t even think that if you see pictures of respected famous people with quotes supposedly by them, that they ever uttered those words.  I have been caught reposting something that supported my own beliefs without checking Snopes–now I don’t repost or I check it.  If I check out something that is too outrageous to be correct, I’ll let the poster know if it is wrong.  They are sometimes grateful–or they say the source of the correction is “biased.”

It also helps that I am a speed reader which makes it take less time to research and find  the various sides of issues. It is important to read information from the “other side” as well as information that supports your beliefs. If you would like to be do research faster, you can check out some of our other blogs:  Why Getting the Big Picture is Essential, Great Speed Reading Techniques That Save You Time.

To stay friends with people who naively post things without thought or care for accuracy, I am truly grateful that Facebook lets me block items from their unreliable sources and still enjoy their children, cat and dog pictures and read their fattening recipes.

But with all the negativity and false promises how do we trust and believe the honest and sincere?  What Advanced Reading Concepts does is help people achieve goals even beyond what they thought was possible.  In this era, how do people trust?  How do people believe?  How do people have faith?  Let’s explore that in the next blog.