In the day and age of Google and other search engines, I think it’s amazing how informed we can be nowadays. But they only go so far, which means there are topics I would like to be more informed about.
One of the topics I am fascinated by is the universe, astrophysics and quantum physics. I do Google the subject often and use other search engines but if I am being brutally honest, there is only so much of it I actually understand. Sometimes the language a lot of the subject matter is written in is too dense for me to grasp. I follow a man on LinkedIn whose posts on the subject I love mostly because I do sort of understand what he is saying. Though often the people who comment on his posts just bamboozle me with the very scientific thoughts they are getting across. I would love to understand more about quantum physics because it just fascinates me. I have a loose grip on it thanks to some of the books I have read, to the extent that I have some understanding of it, but not so much that I feel I truly get it.
At school I was, frankly, rubbish at the sciences and I had little interest in them. It was gently suggested to me that they weren’t my forte and when it came to options, I was guided away from them. They didn’t have to fight me on this, there was no way I was giving up History or English Literature or those types of subjects for Physics and Chemistry. We had to take Biology but I would have gladly given that up too. I had no interest in how physics was taught at school, I didn’t care how lightbulbs worked, frankly. I had no idea about astrophysics or quantum physics but I was always fascinated by the night sky. I loved looking at it and trying to find the brightest star because as a child, I would think it was my brother smiling down at me. And there were times when I would look up at the stars and pray for whatever it was bothering me at that time. If I had known about astrophysics and quantum physics and their links to the stars at school, I would have at least shown some interest in them.
I’m always interested in politics but I am not going to go down that road at the moment, not with all the madness that’s going on at the moment. It doesn’t feel like the right thing to be talking about. Suffice it to say, though, I read information from both sides of the political divide because I don’t want to live in an echo chamber, simply put. I know that the algorithms of social media confirm your bias by showing you that which you believe meaning that most people are really only seeing what they want. I am no saint, but I do try to challenge myself with different viewpoints no matter how unpalatable I might find them at least initially.
Whenever I find something that I don’t agree with, or that I don’t feel is the complete truth which is more often the case, I do my own research. I look deeper into it because I know I am not being told the entire truth. And at the moment, I think it is so much more important than ever before. There is a reason, I feel, why we are being so deliberately divided. Because make no mistake about it, we are being deliberately divided. The stories about illegal immigration are designed to distract us. The issues in Gaza aren’t being fully represented – and why aren’t we as outraged about all the other genocides that are going on such as in the Yemen? It’s deliberate. We get carried away by a social contagion and can end up doing a huge amount of damage in the process.
I don’t understand why people don’t do their own research. Okay, I love to do research. I am a born researcher so I guess that really figures into why I go about things the way I do. But more than that, I don’t like echo chambers. I like good and honest debate. I’m not extreme in anything, I don’t believe in extremism in any form. Yes, I am a feminist but not a radical one because there are always nuances in life. I am very firmly anti-racism but I see there is racism on both sides very often and, again, nuances in how this is presented to us. Why are we not looking at the nuances? Why are we playing to the fiddler’s tune?
My trilogy really does go into this. As I said in a blog yesterday, I didn’t set out to write the books I ended up writing. I was guided to. And they talk about the light and dark, basically taking the blue or the red pill from a spiritual perspective. Allowing yourself to be led by the media and others because it’s easier than challenging it – and I get it. It is much easier to not challenge, to just accept what you’re told. I wish I could do that, but I can’t. I might read something somewhere and then this niggle in my mind starts, the questions start being formed and I have to check out the answers to them. Which can lead me down the rabbit hole but does help me to have more rounded views on things, I think.
I guess in some way doing that research into the different sides of the argument can lead you to a place of indecision, but it doesn’t do that for me. For me, I gather the information together and come to my own conclusion, sometimes from meditation sometimes from my own inspiration or spiritual download. I think, for example, that when it comes to illegal immigration there are reasons why we are being directed to focus on that as there are reasons why people are being directed to become illegal migrants with those reasons being the same thing. It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but I do think there are those who want to undermine the West for their own ends, to gradually build up a stronger power base and essentially take control. Divide and conquer us. I don’t think it has anything to do with religion, I think it’s about money and power. And we are allowing it to happen by focusing on the wrong things.
There, I said what I said.
Louisa Simpson 