Independent investigation of reality sounds like a calm, philosophical phrase—until you try to practice it in a world where almost every major institution is competing to manage what you know, how you feel, and what you are allowed to say.
That tension has been at the heart of my ongoing conversations with researcher and fellow Bahá’í Mehrtash Olson on Created in the Image of God. Our latest discussion circled around one central question: how do you honor experts and institutions, while refusing to hand over your conscience?
In the Bahá’í Faith, this isn’t an optional exercise. We’re told plainly to “see through thine own eyes, and not through the eyes of another,” and to “know of thine own knowledge, and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor.” Truthfulness is called “the foundation of all human virtues.” At the same time, the Universal House of Justice has encouraged the community to engage constructively with scientific consensus and public policy on issues like climate change and COVID—while explicitly stating that individual Bahá’ís are under no obligation to adopt any particular policy view where the sacred texts are not determinative.
So you get a delicate balance:
- Institutions may study, consult, and recommend.
- Individuals must still investigate, weigh, and decide.
That balance becomes much harder to maintain when government, media, and technology begin converging into what Glenn Greenwald has called a “fully closed information system”—the hallmark of totalitarianism.
To see how we are drifting in that direction, Mehrtash walked through one telling piece of recent history. In 1948, the U.S. Congress passed the Smith–Mundt Act, allowing the government to promote American narratives abroad while forbidding those same propaganda tools from being turned inward on US citizens. The assumption was simple: Americans were supposed to receive information from a free press, not from their own government’s influence campaigns.
Fast forward to 2013. A “modernization” of Smith–Mundt effectively removed this firewall. From then on, it became legal for the same kinds of information operations once reserved for foreign audiences to be directed at Americans at home. Around that time, we also saw the growth of State Department infrastructure like the Global Engagement Center and the short‑lived Disinformation Governance Board, as well as a quiet migration of former intelligence officials into senior roles at technology companies.
The point is not that everything these entities do is sinister. It is that the tools now exist—and are increasingly normalized—for government narratives and tech enforcement to work in lock‑step across platforms. When the same handful of actors controls which stories are amplified and which are quietly buried on every major channel, independent investigation of reality becomes harder by design.
The Bahá’í writings treat this issue not as an abstract civil liberties debate but as a spiritual concern. ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá wrote that “when freedom of conscience, liberty of thought, and right of speech prevail… development and growth are inevitable,” and contrasted that with “old forms of despotism” in which “the opinions of men are not free and development is stifled.” Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, went so far as to say that “at the very root of the Cause lies the principle of the undoubted right of the individual to self‑expression, his freedom to declare his conscience and set forth his views.”
By that standard, our present moment is troubling. On paper and in practice, many democracies are moving toward criminalizing broad categories of “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and now “malinformation”—not just as social taboos, but as grounds for arrest or erasure from the digital public square. Algorithms are tuned, often in conversation with state actors, to downrank or delete “problematic” views; entire topics become effectively off‑limits, even for well‑credentialed voices.
Here it helps to be precise about the vocabulary Mehrtash laid out:
- Misinformation is simply wrong information, spread unintentionally. You repeat an outdated statistic or a misheard claim. No malice—just error.
- Disinformation is falsehood spread on purpose: a fabricated story, a doctored image, a quote that was never said, pushed to deceive.
- Malinformation is the newest and most revealing category: factually true information, shared accurately, but considered dangerous or destabilizing because it undermines a narrative or exposes something powerful actors would prefer to keep hidden.
Misinformation and disinformation are obviously real problems. No serious person wants a society in which lies and careless error flood the zone. But malinformation goes further. It treats truth itself as a threat when that truth is inconvenient.
History is full of people whose “malinformation” turned out to be a public blessing. Mehrtash reminded us of Dr. Frances Kelsey at the FDA, who in 1960 resisted intense pressure to approve thalidomide for morning sickness because the safety data were inadequate. She was overruled nowhere else; the drug was widely used in other countries, leading to thousands of severe birth defects. Because she insisted on principled skepticism, that disaster was largely avoided in the United States. President Kennedy honored her for it.
More recently, epidemiologists like Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford proposed “focused protection” during COVID—actively shielding the most vulnerable while avoiding blanket lockdowns that would devastate education, small business, and mental health. Agree or disagree with his approach, he and colleagues were not fringe cranks. Yet their work was algorithmically suppressed and publicly maligned because it deviated from the dominant policy line.
These examples matter because they illustrate a simple truth: essential corrections often arrive first in the form of dissent. If our information systems—by law or by algorithm—punish any voice that challenges prevailing narratives, we will be less safe, less just, and less able to course‑correct when official consensus is wrong.
All this raises the stakes on how we, as individuals and communities, respond. There is clearly a fifth‑generation “battle for the mind” under way. Defense white papers use the language of “cognitive warfare” without embarrassment. Behavioral science and marketing techniques are openly deployed not only to sell products, but to steer entire populations toward or away from particular beliefs and behaviors.
On top of that, our highest ideals are easily hacked. Genuine principles like racial equality, gender justice, and global oneness can be co‑opted as emotional triggers unmoored from their deeper spiritual roots. We can be manipulated in the name of the very values we hold dearest.
What to do?
For me, a few practical orientations emerge from this conversation with Mehrtash and from the Bahá’í teachings:
- Begin from unity. The scriptures say that unity is “the most pressing need of the age” and warn that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Whatever else we do in our investigation of reality, if it leads us to hatred of whole groups, contempt for entire classes of people, or joy at the humiliation of “the other side,” we are drifting off course.
- Adopt working hypotheses, not fixed dogmas. In an environment of partial information and deliberate spin, it’s wise to say: “Based on what I know now, it appears X may be true,” and stay open to revision. That posture is very different from jumping on every leak or theory, or from treating any single source—whether legacy media or a beloved contrarian Substack—as final authority.
- Distinguish seeking from crusading. The spiritual duty to investigate reality does not require us to become full‑time debunkers or online warriors. Often, the most faithful thing we can do is to quietly diversify our sources, support independent journalism that strives for integrity, and be slower to share what stirs our outrage.
- Keep a spiritual frame around evil. I suggested on air that the biblical and Bahá’í language about “Satan” can be useful here. Not as a license to demonize other people, but as a way to remember that deception, ego, and the “father of lies” can operate through any human system—left, right, religious, secular, governmental, or corporate. That keeps us from treating any one person or faction as the ultimate villain, and refocuses attention on the patterns we must all resist in ourselves and in our institutions.
Independent investigation of reality, then, is not about rejecting expertise or romanticizing our private opinions. It is about refusing to surrender our God‑given responsibility to see with our own eyes and to weigh with our own hearts, even as we remain committed to unity and justice.
It asks of us a kind of double loyalty:
- Loyalty to truth, wherever it leads—and
- Loyalty to the human family, refusing to let our truth‑seeking become a pretext for tearing one another apart.
That’s a hard balance to strike. But in an age of managed information, it may be one of the most important spiritual disciplines we can practice.
Tonight on Created in the Image of God
If these questions about truth and unity resonate with you, tonight’s episode (December 23) goes right to their heart in a different context. I’ll be speaking with theologian Ellen Charry about religious unity—specifically, what a real “peace proposal” between Judaism and Christianity might look like in a world where faith has so often been a fault line instead of a bridge.
I hope you’ll join us.