I recently picked up an interest in online spaces that predominantly carry an opposing view to the one I carry so I can be swayed or challenged to see if what I know is true or not.
I was reading a post by Lilith Helstrom on Medium titled:
Do Teenagers Want To Be Trans Because It's Cool?
In the post, Lilith outlined all the ways people who complain about the trans issue can be affected by it. From sports to bathrooms and down to prison, it was an expose to how much the writer knew about "the other side".
In the response of that post was a comment from someone I could only assume to be trans highlighting how conservativism has failed the person by pointing to family, friends and community that rejected this commenter. It was clearer to me that the writer of the medium post was writing in support of people who really have an internal battle and have to go to war externally against every single human they encounter.
For someone like that, the world can be such a dark place and every opposition would seem like a new conflict. Those who stand by the side of these brave people have it in their heart that everyone with an opposing view is motivated to act on it in the same way as those in the lives of the respondent of that post. So, they bash and insult the other side failing to see the humanity on the other side.
On the other hand, there are those who see what's going on in female sports, prisons, pageantries and other female-only venues and think it is ridiculous that women have to be put through these conditions. Complaints of rape in prison and being muscled out of their competition are just a few of the allegations raised. The laws that are passed in favour of those disaffected by gender dysphoria are seen as destructive to society especially when they have loopholes that can be capitalised on by people who could hurt women and girls.
Both sides hold in their minds the best example of the worst person, or that everyone they disagree with can become such an individual and allow the worst to happen. I think when people do that, they fail to see humans on the others and become what they fear.
The Truth
The concept of light and dark must be difficult for the blind to grasp. I don't need a study to lay that out. Imagine hating a blind person because he can't see.
This is what people on both sides of the political spectrum are doing.
If our vision was ever that defective then shining a torch on the eye would make no difference. It would take meeting the person where the person is or else we risk not living together.
Thankfully there are people who have not articulated where they stand on these issues. I am not certain that is a good thing, I just know that they exist and when I try to bring up my views they are more caught up with some Instagram gossip or football.
The question I have is what is a measure of what we should be taking seriously and what we shouldn't. The truth is, whatever you've decided to take seriously might have been handed over to you by someone else decorated in a fallacy specially suited for you. So you may think you are following the right direction but you are just following a script.
So how do we know we are as close to the truth as we can be? We follow the scientific method to investigate phenomena. We observe how things play out, then see what others have said about what we have observed so we can articulate what is happening, after that, we test our hypothesis, we analyse the data and finally, we reach a conclusion.
The result we reach may or may not be what we expect it to be but we need to live with that.
The reason why we have complex systems that work is that each and everyone has gone through this process and passed. The problem now is that politics has started putting its hands into this tested tradition of understanding the world and now structures are being destroyed and replaced.
what do you make of this? Is every structure perfect because it lasts? Do we need to fix every detail of culture and tradition?
Politics and Behaviour
What is politics other than group acting? People are following a plot not different from the plots of the past and of other places. Just look further down history and you will find that one place has done what your country is planning to do even if it is a new thing.
People broadly can be classified into liberals or conservatives whether they like it or not. The liberals want things to change and in a lot of ways have had their way in every policy least society wouldn't have moved passed certain ways of life but at the same time, the latter have also had their way with everything otherwise there would be no relationship between past and present ways. So there is a balance of some sort.
Whether it's schooling, housing and construction, security, health care, amenities, etc. The moment you start saying what you want you'll fall into the "leave it alones" or the "tweakers".
The questions are:
- Are we trying to please the vast majority of people?
- Should we not mind that minorities are affected by the laws made?
- To what extent do we care?
I'm generally biased towards conservativism because of the ineffective nature of reemerging liberal ideas. If they are so effective why didn't they work the first time? If it is truly their first time they they must go through the scientific method without being influenced by politics.
But what if they failed the first time because of things I'm too blind to see? What if the scientific method is not structured well enough to see the benefits of the idea proposed?
Another problem is that money is required to make studies work and sometimes research projects are fully funded by industries or the government and their products are eventually allowed to be used by the masses.
Take the alcohol industry, for example, an actual poison with false research funded by the companies selling the toxin and after years of its use we are only beginning to see its effects.
In the defence of ethanol, many have come out to say that societies have fully functioned on the substance and made progress while other drugs like marijuana have no proof of sustainable use.
People are more interested in knowing what things do for them than what things do as a whole and they will also fight to condemn the ways of others so long as it can harm.
Look at the things you want and ask yourself, are you a liberal thinker or a conservative thinker? What are the aspects of the world you want to be changed? If you are advocating for the "old ways" then you are conservative and if you are asking to test new ideas, you are most likely a liberal.
Open-Mindedness
On the Big Five scale used in modern psychology, open-mindedness is one of the descriptors. The others are consciousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
Being open-minded means you are receptive to new ideas, perspectives, experiences and information without naturally dismissing them. You are more willing to take constructive views and show higher levels of empathy.
On the other hand, if you are closed-minded you are more likely to be the opposite, taking every feature of an open-minded person to its extreme.
Neither temperament is inherently bad or good and most people are closer to the center such that they are open-minded to some change and not some much to others.
See if you can decide which is a conservative and which is a liberal.
If you chose Closed-minded Conservatives then you are right. C for C.
That's all the knowledge I have about this issue, let me know what you think in the comment section below.