The War on Sensemaking

Rule Omega is simple, but often hard to put into practice. The idea is that every message contains some signal and some noise, and we can train ourselves to distinguish truth and nonsense — to separate the wheat from the chaff.

There is a war going on in our current information ecosystem. It is a war of propaganda, emotional manipulation, blatant or unconscious lies. It is nothing new, but is reaching a new intensity as our technology evolves. The result is that it has become harder and harder to make sense of the world, with potentially fatal consequences. If we can’t ma... See more

Being truthful is an individual and communal effort — it means training, not only cognitive abilities, but empathetic relational ones, and our embodied experience in the world. It also means acknowledging that we don’t always have the answer. Admitting our vulnerable ignorance in the face of overwhelming mixed messages may be a good first step.

To become healthy and sane we have to develop an ‘informational immune system’ — to protect our minds from the online onslaught and the right epistemology or sensemaking are key.

Clear and unbiased truth in our information ecology is seriously limited by the amount of bullshit we consume every day, in part a result of the overwhelming intensity of marketing motives and the conformity demands of our in-group. Furthermore, the intentions of our information sources are as often as not based on clickbait or ideology rather than... See more

The first stage of sovereignty is dealing with our own self-deception and neurosis. Sovereignty means we have to ‘become responsibility for our own shit’ and become ‘a light unto ourselves’. This will then help us develop intelligent relationships and communities.

In the past the problem may have been ‘too little information’ and transparency, today it is ‘too much information’ — the excess noise and misinformation we ingest daily. And while we have exponential growth in technology and communication, we also have exponential possibilities of self-deception and bullshit.

Rule Omega means learning to recognise the signal within the noise. This requires a certain attunement and generosity towards the other, especially those who think differently than we do.