Have you ever noticed how we derive our opinions from either repeating opinion as fact even though what we believe to be true may be wrong? It is interesting to me, how we can form strong opinion and use it as fact in our conversation.
This recent presidential election is a perfect example. Discussion and arguments ranged far and wide across every possible topic. Of course topics only supported the point of the person talking. It was rare that the other person or people in the discussion were able to reasonably talk to the other side of the point being made.
I was curious this election, and asked some politically oriented people I know if they even checked on any official web sites for platforms and visions of the opposing party. One by one they said no, they did not.
Ancient civilizations of Mexico and farther south came up in discussion among a group of us a few days ago. The first examples always brought up are how bloodthirsty those cultures were. Inevitably someone goes into an oft repeated discourse of yanking out human hearts from hapless victims while they were still beating.
No one mentions the mathematics that these cultures developed, calendar systems, their ability to sustain cities of tens of thousands with food and goods. Or the pyramids except when describing how the victims were always at the top and the blood ran down the stairs to the ground.
No one mentions how a population in any geographical area needs to be balanced, and while the method chosen method those cultures used may be offensive to us, it was accepted and efficient for the peoples involved. That is rather boring talk in these conversations.
Most discussion follows this form. A topic is brought up and we contribute our communal knowledge of the subject, which generally supports majority group opinion. That is the way we have hold this type of conversation.
In any culture, when resources and food became scarce, people start foraging. Foraging is all in the perspective of course. The Vikings of old were foragers in a general sense as they terrorized the coastlines of England and France. In America before foreign settlers showed up, people had their own system of dealing with redistribution of resources and over population.
The amount of information available to each and every one of us dwarfs the finest libraries of the world from only a few decades ago. Our collective knowledge floating around the internet overwhelms any single library of printed material housed anywhere in the world. All we have to do is decide we are going to read alternate points of view and decide how they compare to what we believe to be correct.
Introducing and discussing alternate views contributes to and enhances rather than takes away from common opinion and tribal knowledge our conversations are made of. It may also lead to a new way of thinking about subjects we are sure we hold the only correct opinion of.
What do you think?
