"Truthiness" and Being Manipulated

Lately, I fell like I am asking myself the same questions more and more: "Am I being manipulated," or more to the point, "Am I getting screwed?" Those feelings have popped up in everything from paying my bills, filling up my fuel tank, reading the national news, and now even reading the local news. The way I usually combat that feeling is educating myself more, reading more, and trying to understand. Unfortunately, one recent conclusion that I entertained was: gee, maybe ignorance is bliss. Through continuous learning, and being an involved citizen I try not to let apathy take root; however, occasionally it does and I have to weed it out.

A buzzword that went around the media a few years ago was truthiness. It stemmed from the satirical show on Comedy Central, The Colbert Report. It was awarded Merriam-Webster's 2006 Word Of The Year, and it was defined as:

truthiness (noun)

1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)
2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

In a 2006 interview with The A.V. Club, Stephen Colbert said, "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything." (1)

Personally I disagree with Mr. Colbert. Facts matter to me a great deal. I certainly hope I am not alone. I don't want truthiness, and I don't want to be blissfully ignorant. If I am to make the best decision or form an intelligent opinion to persuade people, I need the facts, not some one's perception of the facts. Truthiness is just a new word for the old art of rhetoric and manipulation.

Sometimes the best school is the old-school. When listening to people, or reading opinions, I turn to logic to try to find out if I'm being manipulated. I recently read this by Tim Holt of logicalfallacies.info :

"The ability to identify logical fallacies in the arguments of others, and to avoid them in one’s own arguments, is both valuable and increasingly rare. Fallacious reasoning keeps us from knowing the truth, and the inability to think critically makes us vulnerable to manipulation by those skilled in the art of rhetoric."

So I am here to fight the apathy of my generation by fighting my own apathy. I'm here to say that I will not be manipulated, and I will not be lied to. Most importantly I want the facts, not truthiness.

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References

(1) http://www.avclub.com/content/node/44705