We Live in a Fake World

What happens when you can’t trust anything you see?

James Smith is a guy who does some fantastic “thinky” fitness videos on YouTube and one of them he did called, “How The Top 1% Deceive You” caught my attention.

The video is about fitness influencers. You know, the sort of jacked guys you see work out on YouTube and Instagram who look so ripped up that they practically look like they’ve been photoshopped.

What he says is that almost all of them are just guys who are extremely genetically gifted. They’re the sort of men who are naturally lean and build muscle doing pretty much anything in the gym.

They become fitness influencers because they look amazing and then, as they see it’s a competitive environment, they get on massive doses of testosterone, steroids, clenbuterol, and other drugs that make them look even more incredible, at the cost of doing damage to their health. You might say, “Okay, that doesn’t sound all that healthy, but it’s their life, right?”

However, look at what many of these people do.

They’re showing the world pictures of their bodies and telling them, “Hey, if you follow my channel, do the exercises I do, and take these supplements I’m hawking, you can look like me!” Except, you CAN’T look like them because you don’t have their genetics and you’re not on enough gear to kill a horse like they are.

If you want to see a prime example of this in the real world, look at the “Liver King.” The guy looks like a Greek God, is a marketing genius, and has an admittedly great message about eating healthy natural foods, getting sunlight, and eating liver. He made a name for himself, got very rich selling supplements, and swore up and down that he was clean:

Then, it came out that he was using $11,000 per month in drugs to make his physique look like that:

The problem here isn’t fitness influencers per se, the problem is that it’s very difficult to trust ANYTHING you see these days because we live in such a fake world.

Our society has always had this problem TO A DEGREE. Many people have always been willing to say what it takes to be liked. Politicians have always wanted your votes. Obviously, Henry Ford wasn’t neutral about whether people should keep riding horses or buy one of his Model-T Fords.

However, a lot has also changed.

The media used to be very consolidated. At one point, most people got their news from the Big 3 networks and a local newspaper. Certainly, they had their biases, but people wanted to read “all the news that’s fit to print” and those news sources cared a lot about getting it right and at least giving people the impression that they were unbiased.

Today, there are a virtually unlimited number of news sources, nobody seems to care very much if they get stories wrong as long as they’re “on their side,” and people primarily want news sources to tell them what they want to hear. Certainly, there are some sources you can trust more than others, but when political news is almost exclusively thought of as a form of partisan entertainment, it’s very difficult to fully trust anything you read.

Celebrities used to be relatively few in number and seemed to believe that the more they stayed away from controversial topics, the fewer potential fans they’d alienate. Today, there is a virtually unlimited number of “celebrities” and “influencers” with hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans. Many of them have fickle, easily bored niche audiences that demand to be catered to constantly and have a low tolerance for disagreement.

For every JK Rowling who’s willing to go against the crowd by admitting that men can’t choose to become women, there are probably a thousand minor “celebrities” eternally trapped in some persona that may practically require them to push or promote harmful ideas.

They may feel compelled to tell everyone how great it is to be trans even if it’s wrecking their life:

They may have to do insane things like, like pretend it’s okay to walk into random people’s homes to make their fanbase happy:

They may have to promote conspiracy theories they don’t believe:

They may pretend it’s okay to starve themselves to death:

On the other hand, they may also eat themselves to death to keep their audiences coming back:

How do you trust these people? Well, you really can’t.

So, who can you trust? Certainly not the politicians when so many of them will change their positions on a dime when their campaign contributors ask them to do it:

What about scientists? Really? These guys?

Psychologists?

Doctors?

Well, what about your neighbors? Good old common sense still reigns like it used to, right?

Not so much.

Morality has declined in America along with Christianity. Life, for better or worse, is also very soft today compared to what it used to be. My grandfather knew how to hunt, set snares, grow crops, raise livestock, butcher a hog, can vegetables, fix a car, dig a well, and build a pier, a barn, and part of his own house.

It’s nice that we can get by without needing to know how to do any of those things today, but the flip side of learning all those real-world skills is that it gives us a better feel for what has to happen for things to work than hitting a few buttons on a cell phone and having things magically just “appear.”

In other words, the more things you have to learn to do in the real world, amongst real people with real results on the line, the more common sense you tend to develop about how the world really works.

Furthermore, the Internet is a distortion machine. It’s photoshopped people giving you the impression that all they do is travel, party, and look like a big deal on Instagram. It’s relatively tiny groups of people in the real world dominating the conversation in online forums and social media sites where they congregate. It’s weirdos from all over the world getting together in one corner of the Internet, where you’ll come away with the impression that they’re the norm if you don’t know any better. It’s people saying things to try to look cool, fit in with the crowd, and virtue signal on social media where they have dreams of becoming an “influencer.” It’s being served stories designed to outrage, upset, or disgust you over and over again endlessly, everywhere you go, because the media has learned that’s what you’ll click on.

Common sense ain’t so common for people immersed in all of that.

So, what do you do? How do you know who and what to trust?

That is a difficult question because even under the best of circumstances, it often feels like you’re taking best guesses, instead of just definitively knowing the answer, but there are some things that can help.

Don’t just rely on memes, headlines, and media propaganda to understand what’s going on. Listen to lectures. Read books. Absorb what smart people with differing views have to say about topics. Develop some deep knowledge instead of relying on surface knowledge and whatever you can quickly look up on Google. Learn to spot liars (advice here). Start to get a sense of which publications care about getting it right. Some of them do exist, although everyone makes mistakes from time to time.

Pay particular attention to people who both seem to know what they’re talking about and who also seem to have integrity. One of the ways you’ll be able to determine this is that these people won’t always just tell you whatever you want to hear. Make sure to get an understanding of arguments for and against positions you have.

Pay special attention to practices that have been proven in the past. If they’ve worked before, especially across multiple civilizations or for long periods of time, it’s a good indication that there’s some validity to them:

Last, but not least, we have become very focused as a society on being entertained every second of the day, but it’s worth remembering that the most entertaining people are very seldom also the wisest, most capable, or most honest people. Focus less on being entertained by people who talk a good game and promote unproven ideas that sound good and focus on results, what works, and who has a proven track record. The truth is out there and if you put in the work, you can still ferret it out.

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