Personal Testimony On How My Political Self Came To Be

by Matthew Edward Hayward on Saturday, February 11, 2012

I'm going to try to keep this brief.

I was close minded and that didn't work out well and I was unhappy. I became open minded and continue to learn and grow and now I'm happy. That about sums it up.

Personal testimony on how my political self came to be

I'm sure my views will change based on life experience and new information. Information is certainly something I’m open to. Until 2006, I was a neoconservative, voted for and supported George Bush. I could have been quoted as saying, “Turn the whole Middle East into a sheet of glass.” I was not a dissenting voice within the GOP, just a foot soldier willing to blindly trust and do the grunt work.

My views began to change when I stopped having blind faith in people and political parties. I surrendered my life to God, gave up old ideas, became open to new messages, and received help with drinking. I got rid of my TV, no more FOX news, and started going out to dinners with people from all walks of life and religious beliefs. I learned that my thinking had been very black-and-white, and scenarios were often much more complicated than I had thought.

I did something amazing, I started doing my own research instead of trusting corporate media outlets that were all dependent on the same sponsors, and most of which were owned by the same people. More importantly, the large media outlets were in the business of ratings and entertainment, not journalism and news. I found social media, bloggers, and activists that were on the ground uploading live video without commentary, I was finally able to start being allowed to write my own narrative instead of having professional public opinion molders feed me theirs.

The next thing I did was also critical; I began to read philosophy, Aristotle, Plato, and more. Then I started reading about Freud, Alfred Adler, John Dewey, William James, Carl Jung, Maslow, Pavlov, Skinner, Watson, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Anton Wilson, and one of my favorites, Timothy Leary.

After independently studying sociology, psychology, and communication (Edward Louis Bernays and Noam Chomsky, among many others), I concluded that Mark Twain nailed it. “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed.” I took this newly gained education and began to apply it to all that I read, taking things with a grain of sand and comparing them to a variety of sources.

My news comes from a wide array of sources, whatever my Facebook community feels is important and is posting. I purposefully have networked myself with people who hold many different views and many different values and ideologies. I also check in with the Daily Paul, The Drudge Report, and RT. The only time I look at newspapers is when I’m staying in a hotel or going out to eat and notice the headlines in the paper box. The only time I see cable news is when people on Facebook post links to it, such as CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc., which is quite often, I might add. If I were to know what is happening at OWS or any similar event, the last place I am going to go is the mainstream media. You could not get a less intellectually honest point of view than from FOX, CNN, and MSNBC. Generally, I find an on-the-ground activist journalist and watch their incredibly boring live feed (possibly more boring than golf and C-span).

My current views are heavily Influenced by books like The Grand Chessboard, The Political Brain, 1984, Brave New World, Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, The Art Of War, The Big Book, Propaganda, The Law, and The Way Of The Peaceful Warrior.

I’ve learned that it is much easier to listen to things that make us feel good and not challenge our beliefs than to be open to new ideas and seek new perspectives. It is much easier to feed talking points and one-sided perspectives dolled up as “fair and balanced” than to have to think for ourselves, do research, and draw our own conclusions.

Lastly, my views are not political in nature; they are philosophical, moral, and ethically based. Principles are not based on sound bites and propaganda, and they have nothing to do with political party strategy and the desire for power.

P.S. I have not had a TV since 2006 and have no plans to ever have one again.