
The American philosopher Ken Wilber likes to assert that everybody has some important piece of the truth. This applies to people, as well as to ideas. And yes, while the words of, say, a racist might make objectively false language claims, the emotional experience that underlies those claims has a sliver of truth because it explains their complex relationship to reality, however misguided their words and any subsequent actions may be, or however uncomfortable that may make us. And if you take a hundred or a thousand different little truths, dig a little deeper into each of them rather than blindly dismissing whatever threatens your attachment to your own sense of self, what you end up with is a mosaic of interrelated experiences that collectively guide the global culture. A network of truths unveils itself rather than whatever truth is most comforting to you.
The internet is still young, and it is still learning to organize itself. But until it does, the most important skill in the 21st century will be the ability to rationally refine the sense-making apparatus of our mind. Rather than blindly following the automatic filters and biases of the brain, it will be to create our own information filters. Rather than simply being a node in the grand network, it will be to see the network as a whole as it continues to evolve. Rather than pretending that the information we consume has already been filtered for right and wrong just because our own sense of self has an attachment to a particular tribe or an idea that makes us feel emotionally secure, it will be to ask why that information might be right or wrong from someone else’s point of view.
But remember: Our sense of self is malleable. In the same way that we adjusted and adapted to other people’s expectations, we are capable of adjusting and adapting to our own. We can unravel the identity we created years ago and build a new one more aligned with our authentic truth.