Listening to a chorus of your own voices

The title is listening to a chorus of your own voices, what do you think it means? It means that old saying preaching to the choir. When you only have the cacophony of voices that agree with you.  When they constantly say yes you are so right, yes you can do no wrong, yes that thing you did was the right thing to do. It’s a problem in today’s society, in that we have surrounded ourselves with a chorus of our own voices, everything that reinforces our own ego we keep, everything that doesn’t we discard or claim as the wrong thing. It is a self reinforcing cycle, we say we do x  thing for the right reasons, they say we are,  so we keep doing those things, and then tack on more stuff which other people also say is the right thing. Even when we do encounter those who tell us we do the wrong thing, by that time, we have insulated ourselves so much that what they say is always automatically wrong because it doesn’t jive with the chorus of our own making, and so we keep moving further apart as a people.

It’s not just that this pattern tends to separate us as a people that are the problem; it is also because it insulates us from discovering the truth. It convinces us that the truth is only what agrees with us, and all else is lies. So say you are part of a group of secret military scientists working on the next great thing, you know a lot about it, so do your cohorts, you’re justifiably proud of your accomplishment, and think you have installed every safeguard on the planet to keep it from going wrong.  Everybody around you agrees, the military agrees, the politicians agree, it’s the best thing since the discovery of nuclear fission. Then somewhere along the lines somebody comes up with information that suggests this new thing is really quite dangerous, and the reality is this information in the hypothetically scenario completely incontrovertible. Now you could throw out all these promising results, all the promise, and the make the hard choice of abandoning the next great thing, or you could make the choice that supports your ego.  Your ego will say that because of all these other results that those dangerous results couldn’t possibly be right or that it was statistically insignificant.  And because of your chorus, you believe that, it becomes the truth in your eyes; until reality proves you wrong that is, or maybe you get lucky and it doesn’t happen right away, whatever it is. It’s just a hypothetical, no real example, but it illustrates in a more dramatic way, what in some cases the ultimate consequences of only listening to your own chorus is.

Most of the time there isn’t such a fatal result in reality that corrects your ego inflation, which is why I feel that it is starting to happen in our society. You see before this runaway ego chorus cycle would have been corrected by reality, or at least by other choruses who we did occasionally listen to. Now we are falling into the pattern of only accepting our own chorus as the gospel truth.  We have fallen into the trap of ego, of saying that what they say is always wrong, and what I say is always right. It’s dangerous, and very, very wrong.  In the chorus of voices, we always at least say we can be wrong, we always say we listen to other choruses, but the reality is it goes in one ear and out the other. It is not processed, our brain, our ego looks at it, and sees that it is wrong with version of reality so rejects it.

 

Listening to other choruses requires more than listening, it also means the capacity to admit you can be wrong, or at least that you do not have all the answers. Again most of the time we will not say we have all the answers, usually it will be somewhere along the lines of well I might not have all the answer but……….  Even if you can’t admit that you are wrong, at least keep in mind the possibility that you could be wrong,  or that somebody else thinks you could  be wrong.  Don’t just dismiss out of hand that person because it doesn’t jibe with your ego reinforcement. I think it’s always better to have somebody tell you that you are doing something wrong rather than right, because usually the right will attend  to itself, it’s the wrong you need  to deal with. Generally we do accept the truth, but only the truth that is pleasing,  I guess this should be more accepted as being able to face the unpleasant truths. You can only face the unpleasant truths, and indeed know those truths by listening to other choruses.

For we  tend not generally to have the courage to face the unpleasant truth, preferring instead to live in a world created by our own choruses, a world of lies and truths that are pleasant to behold but are rarely the general whole. So advice, the more unpleasant it feels, the more you should probably know it, for it is probably something contrary to what you like, and that is a good thing to know, and indeed something you might need to act upon, even if your ego and other’s egos might not like it.