Learn to unlearn

How can we make successful choices and decisions when our mind is fed with false information?

Photo by @natcon773 via Unsplash

We are making thousands of decisions each day, some knowingly, but most of them subconsciously. Some of the choices we make appear small at first sight, maybe whether our smoothie should contain raspberries rather than strawberries, or which colour shirt we should wear today. Others can seem more meaningful, maybe whether we should make an investment, or a purchase. Decisions we make also can effect others, for example whether we offer a job to somebody, or we decide to have an affair outside our primary relationship. Even with the small decisions, we are triggering a butterfly effect, where one thing leads to another and eventually to great impact on our performance, the life of others and our planet.

The past few days i have been cleaning up the book shelfs in our house. Doing so i had to glance at  all the books i have purchased and kept in the past 45 years. Some are novels, some are biographies, history books, psychology, sociology and many are about sports, wellbeing and nutrition. In the end it was a book about nutrition which made me think about decolonising my bookshelf.

The book ”Superior Nutrition” by Herbert M. Shelton had great impact on my life. Back in 1990 it made me understand the damages of eating processed food and of consuming meat. It made me turn to vegan nutrition. It also helped me to understand the ways that the meat and  pharma industry is manipulating our minds and lobbying for their products. I came to see fast food chains as nothing but the outlets of slaughterhouses, which they are. All of this i still embrace, but reading the first chapter of the book now again, left me disturbed. In the introduction to his book Shelton writes about eating habits in ancient and indigenous cultures, obviously trying to make the argument how far industrialised nations have gone astray. In doing so he is greatly romanticising and exotizising cultures outside the USA. Also making assumptions and repeating stereotypes. No doubt, he is a great expert on nutrition, but here he was out of his waters.

Photo by @paul__schafer via Unsplash

So to me now, the question was, what was i thinking 30 years ago, when i read all this? I do not remember being outraged at the false information he fed into my mind. Most likely i was not putting  too much thought to this part, because i had purchased the book to learn about nutrition and the introduction was not what i paid most attention to.

Then, next, i held another book in my hands. ”The new sorrows of young W.” by Ulrich Plenzdorf. The book title is somewhat ambitious, as it referrs to a famous book by Johan Wolfgang Goethe which had caused a teenage suicide wave in the year 1774. At one point in this book, Plenzdorf dwells in the assumed knowledge he can gain from reading just one book, assuming that the author has read a thousand books prior to writing and that the authors of those had done the same, the conclusion being that by reading just one book, you are reading actually millions of books. Remembering this, made me ask, how much false information do we feed into our subconscious by reading just one book? And not just the books we read, also the movies we watch, the music we listen to without paying attention to the lyrics, the talkshows, the commercials we watch and the magazines we read? How many prejudices do we reconfirm in our minds?

I looked at all the books i once cherished enough to want to keep them around since decades and wondered if i now have to make rid of maybe more than half of them? Then i thought of the nazis book burnings in May 1933 and i thought of Martin Luther King and even Malcom X using out-aged language and terminology and i decided: No! But we have to read and consume entertainment and information, even the greatest books, our favourite artists and even what our best and wisest friends say with a critical mind and we have to add context to problematic publications.  

After all, to make better decisions, whether big or small, consciously or subconscious, to be the best we can be and to be able to contribute to the world in the best possible way, we should be careful about the informations we digest.

Also, we have to identify and unlearn all the misconceptions which we have let into our minds in the past. Let the work begin!