“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.

I’ve always liked this quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is followed closely by the Cheshire Cat’s “We’re all mad here”, and since it is beginning to feel like we’ve gone through the looking glass, I thought I would share the one wish I have for the world right now: be curious. Ask questions. Stay open minded. Listen to other perspectives. Recognise that there is a world of difference between a belief and a fact. For example, gravity is a fact. Choosing not to believe in it does not mean I can fly.

Instead, a belief is built upon faith, but actual knowledge and understanding require facts. The latter are under attack at the moment, with people seeming to argue that 2 + 2 = 13. Or maybe 64. Or perhaps whatever they feel it should be. Yet that’s the thing about facts: wanting something to be true does not make it so. Likewise, just because something is said or written–online, on the news, on social media–does not automatically make it true.

Curiosity requires critical thinking: What is the context? What is the evidence? Who are you putting your faith in? Are they really worth that trust? What biases or hidden (or not-so-hidden) agendas do they bring to the table? After all, would you put your faith in the equivalent of Alice’s Queen of Hearts, who Lewis Carroll himself described as a “blind and aimless Fury”?

We have at our fingertips a vast source of information; it has never been so easy to double- or triple-check the sound bites and factoids we stumble across on a daily basis. Try Google. Try Snopes. Try stepping outside of the echo chamber and turning the looking glass in a different direction.