So do you believe everything you are told?

Hi guys. Recently, I had a reader (let's call her BSL) post a question in the comments section of one of my posts and basically, her father had fed her a pile of lies about how racist white people are in the UK towards foreigners. It irritated me of course because it was completely untrue and nothing short of extreme racism by assuming the very worst of white people. It was the usual cliches about white people looking down on foreigners and how hard it would be for foreigners to get a job in the UK because of racism - none of that is true of course. I'm not saying that the streets of London are paved with gold (they are not I assure you), but you're going to be judged as an individual - are you highly educated or are you barely literate? Have you managed to make a lot of money last year or are you in a lot of debt? Do you have loads of influential friends in high places or do you have very few friends at all? Do you have the skills to command an extremely high salary or can you only perform unskilled work? Are you beautiful and sexy or do you have as much charm as a smelly dustbin? Are you eloquent when you express yourself or are you totally inarticulate at the best of times? You get the idea - you will be judged, after all, not all 'foreigners' are the same. The expatriate community in London consists of people as diverse as investment bankers from rich countries like America and Finland to poor migrant workers from poorer countries like Romania and Bulgaria doing the work that the locals don't want to do. The British do know that 'foreigners' is not a monolithic entity, so why would anyone suggest that the British people look down on foreigners then?

Some people don't know the difference between expressing an opinion and trying to pass an opinion off as fact - now BSL's father may not like white people, he may be a complete racist and as controversial as it may sound, that's his right to be racist but when he tries to convince his daughter that white people are all evil racists, that's when he's crossing the line by trying to pass off what is at best a wild guess about a situation he knows little about as fact. Is this uncommon? No, Donald Trump does it all the time: just look at his Twitter feed at how he makes up random crap and shouts about it on Twitter - it is then up to us to learn how to discern fact from fake news, the truth from alternative facts. I remember how I wrote a whole series of blog posts on the case of Irene Clennell because the journalist from Buzzfeed Emily Duggan admitted to having gotten the facts wrong in her initial report, but felt that it was a minor detail that wouldn't detract from the human interest story that was unfolding. In short, she effectively admitted that she didn't want to let facts get in the way of an interesting story that is click bait for your website?  So whether you're surfing the web and looking at the links your friends are sharing on social media or you're sitting down to dinner with your family at home, you need to be discerning all the time - so if your father is telling you a story, do you simply accept that he is telling the truth and that all the facts in his story are accurate? Or do you start questioning if he actually knows all the facts, has he omitted anything? If he heard the story from someone, did the story originate from a reliable source or has it been corrupted?

I don't know how to put this delicately so I am going to be blunt: my parents aren't exactly what you would consider educated. They are retired primary school teachers but when they got qualified, you only needed to have completed your secondary school education before you could start teaching at primary school level and so let's just say there's a huge difference between the teachers in Singapore like my parents who have already retired and those teachers in Singapore who are in their 20s and 30s today. So I got pretty used to my parents spouting complete bullshit at the dinner table, but since my family is so traditionally Chinese, we were conditioned to simply listen in silence as my parents embarrassed themselves, exposing their ignorance and stupidity by ranting on about a topic they knew little about. I remember back in the 1986 when the Swissôtel The Stamford (known as the Westin Stamford back then) was built - my mother claimed that the skyscraper was so high that you would have snow and ice on the roof of the building. Now I knew that was false, the Westin Stamford is 226 meters tall. that's simply not high enough to result in a significant drop of temperature. On a clear day, the temperature will fall by 9.8 degrees every 1000 meters, so if the temperature outside is currently 29.4 degrees, then the Westin Stamford would need to be at least 3000 meters tall for the temperature on the roof to be zero degrees, cold enough for water to freeze. In fact, the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is only 828 meters tall. So in short, my mother was spouting bullshit as usual (what's new), but did we correct her? No. I think there's this consensus amongst my siblings and I - we know our mother is very stupid and reminding her just how uneducated and stupid she is would simply be cruel. We can't cure her of her stupidity, we can't start to educate her at her age, so we simply keep quiet when she says something utterly ridiculous and stupid. For the record, the temperature difference between the street level and the top of a 226 meter tall building is only 2.21 degrees, that difference is hardly perceptible.

And that's just a pretty straightforward example concerning science, mathematics and geography: my parents have said a lot of ignorant bullshit over the years and I think I was about 8 when I first realized that they were talking rubbish. I also learnt that trying to challenge them would be seen as disrespectful and rude, so I also learnt to keep my mouth shut when they spoke. In the words of my sister, "leave it, let it go, it's not worth it." So as you can see, years before president Trump came along, years before we had heard about fake news or alternative facts, I was already having to deal with something very similar as a child back in the 1980s. So this really makes me wonder why people like BSL are totally unable to be discerning when speaking to her father, she seems to have no ability to distinguish the facts from the bullshit. Gosh, she reminds me of another reader who used to leave me comments that begin with, "my mother said that..." and of course, his mother would be completely wrong as she is an uneducated woman who doesn't know a thing. I don't know how to put it to these people delicately: your parents are not educated, they are idiots, they don't know what they are talking about and you should never believe what they say. You're not being disrespectful or a bad child if you simply filter the facts from the flood of bullshit coming your way. What is it with Singaporean children who simply believe anything their parents say, even if they spout a big pile of stinking bullshit? Are they somehow culturally prevented from applying any kind of filter when communicating with their parents, that somehow they are conditioned to believe everything their parents say? Are they somehow totally oblivious to the fact that their parents are uneducated idiots? 

There is a crucial point in our lives when an important transition happens. I want you to think about what it was like when you were very young, say when you were like 4 years old - back then you would believe anything your parents told you because they were adults and you're just a child, a very young one at that. A child that young isn't capable of discerning whether or not an adult is telling the truth or not. That relationship would evolve as the child gets older and let me give you an example: I started getting interested in gymnastics when I was about 8 years old after watching the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. My mother had a theory after she was these tiny Romanian and Chinese gymnastics performing so well - she claimed that doing gymnastics is harmful to the body because you had to do so many exercises that would damage your spine, that's why the gymnasts who had trained for so many years to become champions were so short. Then we also watched a basketball game - I recall it was between the men's finals Spain and America. All the basketball players were very tall obviously, so my mother then declared, "if you want to grow up to be tall like those basketball players, then you should play basketball and not do gymnastics! Basketball is a good exercise that will help you grow up tall and strong." But of course, we now know that my mother's theories about sports and growth are completely wrong - she had wrongly assumed that one's choice of sports can affect one's height when really, how tall you will grow is mostly determined by your DNA. Yes a healthy diet and regular exercise can help you achieve your maximum possible height, but do allow me to dismantle my mother's theory and dismiss it with some modern science and looking at the evidence.

One of the best Chinese gymnasts in recent years is Shang Chunsong - she is tiny: even at 22 years old, she stands at just 1.42 meters tall and weighs just 34 kilograms. She is an adult who is as small as a 10 year old girl. But did her gymnastics training impede her growth? No, it didn't: gymnastics is a sport that favours short people like Shang the same way basketball favours tall people like Chinese basketball superstar Yao Ming who stands at 2.29 meters tall. So imagine if Shang trained basketball all her life and Yao trained gymnastics instead - would Shang be super tall and Yao then become the shortest guy around? No, of course not. Regardless of what sport Shang or Yao chose, Shang would still be tiny and Yao would still be a giant. You know the saying, when life give you lemons, make lemonade? Since Yao was incredibly tall even as a child, his parents pushed him towards a career in basketball competitively from the age of 9. But hey, with Google, I can look up the facts about Shang and Yao easily - well, we didn't have the internet back in the 1980s. So how did I figure out at the age of 8 that my mother was completely wrong then? It started during a PE lesson when I observed how the taller children had a physical advantage whilst doing certain sports but none of them did any special training to gain that extra height. Then I noticed that these taller kids also tended to have quite tall parents as well and that the shorter kids in my class tended to have shorter parents too. I'm pretty short, but then again, so are my parents. I then went to talk to some of the teachers and parents about how I could grow taller - thankfully, I got some sound advice about having healthy diet and regular exercise, but nobody mentioned playing sports like basketball. That was when I realized that my mother was completely wrong on the issue - she couldn't explain the causality in her theory.

However at the age of 8, I wasn't quite ready to confront my mother and say, "you're wrong, I'm right. I may be an 8 year old kid but I'm so much smarter than you already. Holy shit, you're actually really quite stupid aren't you?" No, that's just not what we do in our Asian culture I'm afraid. My mother wanted me to quit gymnastics because she thought it was dangerous, so she used to threaten me, "you will become the shortest boy in the class if you continue your gymnastics training, you won't grow because of all the damage it is doing to your spine!" I knew she was spouting bullshit of course, so I used to just shrug and say, "good, because I would then be even better at gymnastics if I became shorter!" So there you go, at the age of 8, through a simple process of observing the world around me, I realized that my mother didn't know what she was talking about and that I was already smarter than her. So going back to these readers who post comments that begin with, "my father/mother said that...", I just want to stop them and ask, "did it not occur to you that your parents are wrong and they  don't know what the hell they're talking about? Like I was 8 years old when I first figured that out and I was barely doing long division in class during maths lessons at that age - I wasn't at university then, I stress that I was only in primary two when I figured that out." So how is it possible that these Singaporeans are seemingly educated, but lack the ability to discern when their parents are telling the truth and when they are spouting a big pile of bullshit then? Don't they ever pause for a moment and consider if it is true? Well, I have an alternative theory.

You see, I am in a rather unique situation in my family - both my parents are not highly educated and pretty darn stupid yet I am a triple scholar who speaks 20 languages. I work in corporate finance whilst they were primary school teachers. I can't stress how unusual this situation is because most children do take after their parents: remember the basketball superstar Yao Ming who stands at 2.29 meters tall? Well, both his parents are super tall too: his father is 2.01 meters tall and his mother is 1.91 meters tall - so it is not surprise at all that Yao turned out to be super tall since he had inherited that trait from his parents. By the same token, stupid parents usually bring up stupid children. I even once suspected that I was adopted - after all, I have two older sisters and I knew my parents desperately wanted a son. Since I have so little in common with my parents, I always thought there was a possibility that they secretly adopted me rather than try for a third child (just in case the third child turned out to be a girl again). So as a naturally inquisitive and intelligent child, I found ways to test my mother's theories within my primary school as an 8 year old kid, I treated it like a science experiment rather than simply believe what she said. But of course, if I was a really dumb kid then I would not even know how to start testing a theory like that and deconstruct my mother's argument about causality. If you're naturally smart, you can figure stuff out like that even as an 8 year old kid without any help. But if you're really stupid, then you have no chance of figuring that out even as a 28 year old adult and I suppose you would then just default to believing whatever your parents told you - even if it was a pile of bullshit and that is what stupid people who have equally stupid parents do. 

Okay, I realize I'm just being downright mean and cruel here - I've called my own parents stupid and I'm saying that I have two very stupid readers who have equally stupid parents. But even I think that is probably a rather simplistic explanation: maybe they are indeed from really stupid families where every single family member is really that stupid. What about those who are seemingly well educated but somehow are culturally conditioned to believe anything their parents say? Is it possible that they can simply put aside any common sense that their education might have imparted them when it comes to listening to their parents? You see, my sisters know how stupid my parents are but they are not confrontational and always treat my parents with a lot of respect. So even if my father would say something really stupid (which he does all the time), they would simply smile, ignore it whilst suppressing the urge to respond and then just let it go. They wouldn't correct him nor would they get into an argument about it - yet at the same time, they are completely aware that he doesn't have a clue what the hell he is talking about and that he's probably completely wrong about the topic. Somehow, my sisters have found a way to get along with my parents and I suppose when they have to deal with their stupid crap on a daily basis, they have more or less become immune to it. Thus they do not flinch at all when my parents say something really stupid - all in the name of keeping the peace. I would have thought that most Asian people would approach the situation the same way as  my sisters have - this is a compromise designed to maintain the peace.

Of course, this isn't a straight forward issue at all - there is no one size fits all approach to this because we all have different parents. After all, I had a very antagonistic relationship with my parents from a very early age, so that naturally led me to want to doubt and test anything that my parents said to me. But what if someone like my reader BSL (whose father came up with all those incredibly racist statements) actually had a really good relationship with her father - let's for a moment put aside the fact that her father is probably an uneducated, ignorant racist, what if despite all that, he has somehow managed to cultivate an incredibly good relationship with his daughter and she trusts him completely? Note that I am just postulating as I never heard back from BSL after I pointed out to her that her father is an idiot who's completely wrong, which is a shame as I would have liked to have challenged her to think outside the box - she clearly believed that her father was telling the truth and she would rather end the conversation with me than to allow me to challenge that. After all, I am but another blogger out there on the internet whilst she still has to live with her father (as she is a student). So here's another theory, perhaps BSL is not stupid at all, but she isn't emotionally prepared to allow someone like me to tell her just how flawed her father is and thus she ignores any evidence contrary to what she wants to believe - she probably has a blind spot the size of the Pacific ocean where she conveniently shoves evidence she would rather not have to deal with. You'll be amazed how many people actually do that - it is not like they are stupid or oblivious to the facts presented to them, but it is the equivalent of kicking the can down the road, an act of procrastination because they're simply saying, "I'll park this aside and deal with this piece of information later, just not right now, okay?"

Let me share with you a true story involving three people I know - I have to change their names because they are personal friends of mine, but the story will illustrate how a perfectly intelligent person can have a huge blind spot. I have known Karen (not her real name) since the 1990s through gymnastics and she got married to this guy called Frederic (again not his real name) - I got to know Frederic as well through some of the work I did as a stuntman years ago. Likewise, through the same network of stunt performers, I got to know Lisa (obviously not her real name) - another gymnast/stunt performer and I actually became really good friends with Lisa as I've had the chance to work with her many times. For a while, Lisa was renting the spare room from Karen and Frederic - they were all good friends, working in the same industry and they gave Lisa a good price for her rent. Things started changing when Karen became pregnant with her first child - Frederic got bored with her physically and started looking for casual encounters with other women on the internet. Lisa was aware that Frederic had started sleeping around again, but didn't know how to tell Karen - she was afraid that Karen wouldn't believe her and she was also very aware that Karen didn't need any additional stress when she was heavily pregnant, hence Lisa chose to keep quiet about it and simply looked the other way. Karen however, seemed completely obsessed with becoming the perfect mother and was far more interested in researching the best way to breastfeed a baby or which was the best brand of nappies for babies than actually paying any attention to what her husband was getting up to. Thus whether it was a conscious decision or not, Karen was also looking the other way too.

Did things get any better after Karen finally gave birth to her daughter? No, she then had the desire to become the world's best mother and became totally dedicated to her daughter. She continued to look the other way to her husband's behaviour and Lisa had kept quiet all this time until one day, she came home and caught Frederic having sex with an Eastern European woman in her bedroom. Lisa was furious, "this is where I sleep, that is my bed! I don't care what you do outside the house but how could you do this in my room?" Frederic mumbled that he couldn't do it in his own bedroom and there were baby things all over the sofa. The Eastern European woman got dressed and left quickly, Frederic said to Lisa, "Hey, if you're thinking about telling Karen then go ahead, do what you like. She will never believe you anyway." However, Lisa decided that Frederic has crossed the line and she decided that evening to tell Karen what she had witnessed. Karen looked angrily at Lisa and said, "Frederic called me earlier - he told me that when he came home, you were having sex with a strange Eastern European man in your room. Look Lisa, you're my friend, what relationships you want to have is none of my business - but we have a baby in this house and I'm just not comfortable with you breaking the house rules and bringing back a stranger in the middle of the day to do this kind of thing. I think it is best you find somewhere else to live - I'm sorry, I'm just thinking about what is best for my baby. I have spoken to Frederic and we want you out of here by the end of the month, you'll get your deposit back - I don't want there to be any hard feelings."

Lisa decided that challenging Karen at this point would only make things a lot worse, so she swallowed her pride and agreed to start looking for a new place to live. As if to make a point that he had won and Lisa had lost, when Lisa returned home the next day, she found Frederic lying on her bed only in his underwear, watching porn on his phone. He then said to her, "Lisa, how foolish of you to think you could tell Karen anything - she would never believe a word you say. Have you ever tried having a decent conversation with her in the last 12 months? She is either going on and on about baby formula and early learning, or she switches to that baby talk mode which she uses with the baby. I've not been able to get any sense out of her in the last 12 months and you think she will listen to reason? Do you think you know her better than me? You know what I told her? I told her you were so jealous of her having a beautiful baby and she said you're a pathetic lonely spinster. Yes, that's what she thinks of you. Oh she is so easily manipulated, she is as naive as the baby. Listen you can stay if you want, just know your place in this house. In return, I will convince Karen that she should graciously forgive you and that you have every right to have a boyfriend as you're so lonely - in return, I want to have access to your room anytime I want to do anything I want. I'll give you some warning of course and you can then go to the gym, the movies or the mall for an hour or two until I'm done. So what is it going to be then darling?" Lisa said, "no thanks, I've already found a nice place and I'll be moving out this weekend. Now please, get the hell out of my room. Things between you and Karen are seriously messed up and the two of you need to sort yourselves out for the sake of your child. I don't want to be any part of this ludicrous shit storm you call a marriage. I should have moved out ages ago."

Lisa was so upset about what happened because Karen now thinks she is a complete liar and she feels completely manipulated and used by Frederic. I know what Karen is like - she had been completely obsessed by motherhood to the point of neglecting her husband, apart from when she is nagging at him for not being a good enough father to her little princess. Is Karen a clever, educated woman? Yes she is, I have known her for a long time and she is strikingly intelligent, witty and has a good mind for business. She certainly isn't stupid, no that is not the reason why she allows her husband to do what he does behind her back. I suppose you could call her irrational - she is so obsessed with creating the perfect family for her daughter to grow up in that she has turned a blind eye to her husband sleeping around because acknowledging that her marriage has well and truly fallen apart would have repercussions for her young daughter. She just wouldn't know how to explain to her daughter what was happening, so instead she keeps smiling and pretends that everything is great in her perfect little family. Lisa has told me that Karen knows exactly what her husband is doing - her husband hasn't been that good at hiding the evidence, but Karen has simply chosen not to acknowledge it at all and shove it all into her blind spot which has basically given Frederic the green light to do what the hell he wants without worrying too much about burying the evidence or covering his tracks. So rather than confront Frederic about what he is doing, she would rather think about how to make her daughter's meals more nutritious or improve her daughter's reading.

I do wonder what is going through Karen's mind - you see, she chooses to believe anything her husband tells her like, "honey I'll be home late tonight, don't wait up for me, I'm going to meet some guys down at the pub to discuss a new project for work". She would just say, "okay honey, that's fine" rather than try to check where he is actually going that night or ask any questions about the 'new project'. I am still in touch with her via Facebook and I see loads of posts of her daughter - if it has snowed, then you will she will post a picture of her daughter playing in the snow, building a snow man. If it is Christmas, then she will post a picture of her daughter sitting by the Christmas tree surrounded by her presents. If it is a hot summer's day, you will see a picture of her daughter enjoying an ice cream sundae in the park. You barely see any pictures of Karen - she only appears when she happens to be in the photo with her daughter. So you get the picture - it seems that Karen is very keen to show everyone on social media what a good mother she is and just how happy her daughter is. Whilst I don't doubt that Karen is indeed a good mother and that her daughter is very happy indeed, I am also rather disturbed by the lengths she has gone to in order to portray and maintain that image especially now I know that her husband is sleeping around and she is simply turning a blind eye to it all. Neither Lisa nor I can figure how exactly Karen feels about the situation, how she justifies all this but I guess her desire to give her daughter the perfect upbringing trumps everything else now, including her husband's infidelity. Will she ever confront Frederic or is she so reliant on his money to fund her daughter's 100% perfect childhood that she will just continue the current status quo?

There are people like Karen who are seemingly well-educated, intelligent and reasonable yet they can behave in a totally irrational manner when it comes to believing the lies that her husband is telling her. You know, when I first started the draft for this blog post, I thought I was going to focus on people like BSL's father - the ignorant, stupid man who is telling his daughter a big pile of bullshit and lies about white people in the West. Then I thought, wait a minute, that isn't interesting at all - he is merely a stupid man doing something incredibly stupid: that's exactly what stupid people do. There isn't anything unusual or interesting about a stupid person doing something stupid, that's merely a very predictable outcome. I didn't want to write another blog post attacking stupid people for being stupid and it would almost come across as quite a nasty personal attack for singling out one reader for simply having a father who is indeed incredibly stupid. (Hey, we don't get to choose our parents.) After all, you can expect a stupid person to say something stupid the same way you can expect a lemon to taste very sour - it is only when a lemon tastes incredibly sweet that you would sit up and say, "hey something really interesting and unusual is happening here." As I began writing this piece, I became more fascinated with the concept of someone who is seemingly intelligent believing something totally stupid and ridiculous. It is the contradiction, the juxtaposition that makes no sense and makes me want to find out what's going on.

So that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Have you ever met someone like BSL or Karen? What do you do when you parents happen to say something incorrect or misinformed? Do you challenge them or do you choose to avoid conflict by keeping quiet? At what age do you expect children and teenagers to start differentiating between fake news and actual facts? How do you bring up a child in the age of fake news, how to you teach a child that you cannot trust what adults say and they have to learn to discern the lies from the truth? And finally, how long do you think Karen can keep this "happy family" charades going? Do leave a comment below, share your experiences. Many thanks for reading.