People need to level up more quickly.

Understanding what’s happening and how things work is the first step.

And I’ve got a thread in me to impart what I think is a critical lesson we need to understand for this current moment in history and what comes next....

Humans usually think and process information through stories.

And in the age of social media, and other media influenced by social media, those who are behind the most compelling/interesting/evocative stories with the widest reach are in control.

Consistent ownership of prevailing narratives allow the owners to define culture.

Culture shapes what people do and don’t do. It shapes what’s acceptable and unacceptable. It shapes what they believe and don’t believe.

As a result, stories can provide small and large groups of people with immense power... for centuries.

These stories can be lies, fear-mongering, scams. They can also be art, beauty, facts...

Regardless of what can be proven true or false about a story, your response to it will mostly depend on what you believe.

Culture forms and then continues to influence that feedback loop.

The loop involves perception, interpretation, response, result... on repeat.

What gets believed or adopted usually relates to some combination of your identity, the norms and beliefs of your community (culture), how much you have sampled the world, and what you took away from those experiences.

How you interpret any story presented to you depends on who you believe yourself to be, your relationships, and your mental model of the world.

Based on what *I* know and believe, this is how I think about a lot of the social tensions we’re experiencing right now.

Many people start out with a poor foundation to build good feedback loops. I don’t think it means they are not “smart.” Just a product of their environment.

Some people have a fantastic ability to perceive, interpret, and adapt to what they learn, but they have not experienced enough of the world to have a high-fidelity model.

This gets dangerous when they hold positions of power and also lack the humility to know this.

Some are just bad actors.

Back to the storytelling...

Know this: every human is willing to lie and manipulate in some shape or form to get what they want. It just happens in varying degrees.

But there is a range of acceptable and unacceptable. It largely depends on the goal and the culture and circumstances surrounding it.

There are scammers out there. There will always be scammers out there.

We need to make it harder for people to be *susceptible* to scams.

That starts with giving folks better tools to interpret what they perceive.

And giving them a lot of tactics to manage their response in way that produces a positive/healthy/constructive result.

Imho it includes developing key skills and confidence in their abilities to:
Make values-aligned judgements
Have self-awareness and self control
Cooperate and compromise
Provide value to others
Influence what happens to them
Adapt to ever-changing environments

And I don’t want to suggest what it should be without also suggesting what it should NOT be...

When we think of what we DON’T want people to be, I think it’s probably some *extreme* manifestation of:

selfishness
indifference
apathy
narcissism
entitlement
sadism
greed
spitefulness
callousness
detachment
moral disengagement

But we have to reconcile what’s acceptable and unacceptable as a group—as many of us as possible—who are models of the way we believe people should be.

Maybe based on who among us is able to most successfully update their mental model and adapt when confronted with evidence...?

And we’re still missing an effective tool to do this with large groups of people.

The ones most readily available have been corrupted by capitalism.

Regardless, this is a key piece to the future we want to build.

And there’s a larger debate to be had about whether this is an impossible task.

I personally believe that it’s not impossible. Just really fucking hard.

But achieving this means all of us can more effectively protect ourselves from the covert and overt dangers around us.

Adding to this thought:

Some people have good feedback loops, but circumstances coerce them to make “unacceptable” decisions in order to survive (ex: they need to eat >> there is no food >> they steal a loaf of bread). https://twitter.com/operaqueenie/status/1309893301554696192?s=21