On Wednesday I posted a piece entitled “Cryptid Epistemology,” which was more about academics’ desperate attempt to monopolize “truth” through a campaign against “disinformation” more than it was about searching for Bigfoot.  That said, the two topics are intertwined, and the piece is an exploration of why access to information, and the ability to parse and analyze that information, is so important.

What I admire about the more humble and intellectually honest side of the cryptid community is that they are open to the possibility that we don’t know everything.  Indeed, they carefully sift through thousands of hours of footage, interviews, blog posts, books, etc., in search of gold.  That they often come away with pyrite does not discourage them; instead, they keep looking, gently setting aside the few nuggets they find for further evaluation.

Maybe Bigfoot exists—maybe he doesn’t.  What’s important is that these folks, so often dismissed as kooks, are sharpening their minds and engaging in intense analysis of thousands of data points.  They are making healthy skeptics of themselves, even as they search for something at which most skeptics would scoff.

Who, I ask, is the real kook?  So many self-proclaimed “skeptics” are merely parroting the very same narrative that was spoon-fed to them in a high school history class, or in their freshman philosophy course at college.  They often do so with an air of condescension and derision, the sort of know-it-all-ism that derives from an excess of education but a dearth of wisdom.

The older I get, the more I realize how precious little any of us know.  Things that were taught to me as inerrant “truth” have turned out to be a vast panoply of lies and half-truths, assembled into a shambolic, Frankensteinian mess for the benefit of the government and corporations.

To give one rather benign but illustrative example, before I turn it over to Audre Myers:  as a kid, my elementary school teachers would, it seemed to me, forcefully and a bit angrily insist that the United States was moving to the metric system, and we’d all need to learn it so we could cope in a post-Imperial units world.  It was all nonsense, and even as little kids we all kind of knew it was a bit overblown.  Had our teachers said, “the metric system is important to learn because it is the standard in scientific research,” it would have been a.) truthful and b.) productive.  Instead, they tried to terrify us into thinking we’d all be European, holding our cigarettes like gay men and speaking Esperanto (yes, another lie they told us in elementary school).

To be fair, things that I have taught have turned out to be inaccurate.  The more I study history, for example, the more I realize that the narratives I teach—often derived from what my history teachers taught me—are often incomplete or even incorrect.  When teachers talk about creating lifelong learners, it is for a reason:  we can only get a small fraction of the Truth in our lives, and we should constantly undergo a refining process to purify our knowledge.

But I have overstayed my welcome in this overly long introduction.  Audre offers up an excellent continuation of “Cryptid Epistemology,” her own further refinement on the journey towards Truth:

Using Vice President Kamala Harris’ favorite tool, here is the Venn diagram of intersection between The Portly Politico and myself: we overlap (come together) in Christianity, skepticism, and truth.

“Cryptid Epistemology” is probably one of The Portly Politico’s best articles to date – concise, considered, logical, and fully developed. I have a special interest in the topic presented as I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only person submitting articles to The Portly Politico that feature bigfoot – a cryptid. I am in my seventh year of armchair research regarding bigfoot; in that time, I have seen some of the worst fakes you can imagine – so bad, in fact, that small children wouldn’t even believe them – and some photos/videos that push me to the brink of accepting that bigfoot is, indeed, a living, breathing creature of God’s creation.

Port’s assertion regarding ‘wanting to believe’ having an affect on people’s perceptions is accurate. Pareidolia (the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern) abounds. Seeing is not necessarily believing. There has to be context, peripheral indicators (foot prints, for instance), source confirmation, etc., in order to make considered opinions when a flesh and blood sample is not available. In other words, we can’t just look at what is immediately in front of us, we have to examine the wider area around what is in focus.

What I’ve learned from doing my research is the ability to apply that method to the world at large, which, for a lot of us, means politics. We look at something in the news today and spend the rest of the day, if not more, checking the periphery – what else is going on around it? who said what, when? who else saw/heard it? Pilate looked at Jesus and asked, “What is truth”. We ask ourselves that question a million times a day.

We can be misinformed, malinformed, dis-informed or what ever else they come up with, but it is our duty to ourselves, our families, our friends to look at the wider field and not just the thing in tight focus. My mama always said there’s three sides to every story – his, hers, and the truth. And that’s how we should determine truth – read, listen, watch and then discern.