We live in an age of unparalleled access to information, with the ability to quickly comb through an almost unlimited number of ideas. Right now, from the comfort of my cozy home in South-Eastern Wyoming, I can learn about anything. From politics to current events to knitting and organic apple pie recipes, I have more information at my fingertips than I could ever hope to absorb in a lifetime. The key word there is absorb.
Sure, I could spend a day or two learning about the fall of the Roman Empire but I wouldn’t have more than a basic understanding of the information. I could jump from topic to topic, reading everything and learning nothing.
We’re bombarded by news constantly. A refugee crisis pops up one day, then there’s a bomb threat or missing plane another. And the media is happy to oblige our never ending curiosity. They’ll pump us full of dozens of stories a day, giving us a bare bones understanding before whisking our focus away to the next tidbit.
And you know what? This is the core problem behind almost every issue facing our country today. It’s hard to maintain outrage over Ben Carson’s comments on school shootings or whatever stupid thing Donald Trump verbally vomited out into the world last when there’s always a new controversy over the horizon.
Rather than playing along, we all need to step back and take a breath. We need to read, think, and absorb before we spring into action. We need to think about the underlying cause behind the issues and understand the complexities of our ideas before we attack someone or something. Before we start fighting, we need to really know why we’re fighting.
And yes, at the moment conservatives are the guiltiest of letting ineffective or downright malicious legislation that appeals to the beliefs of an ever-increasingly conservative base supersede bills that could help our country. They’re perfectly willing to close down Planned Parenthood to prevent abortion, regardless of the fact that in doing so all they’re going to do is increase the deaths and complications from abortion while limiting access to an incredibly important health resource for women in impoverished communities. They’re willing to ignore the effect that ineffective gun regulation has on the entire country. They’re willing to ignore a lot to gain a little, and that’s a problem.
I know I’m bastardizing this House of Cards quote, but the underlying concept still rings true: ideas based on emotion aren’t ideas at all, they’re instinct. If you’re unable (or unwilling) to make an effort to look past your own implicit biases you drastically increase the chance that your ideas will harm the world rather than transform it into what you want it to be.
You and I are part of the problem too. How many of us really get complex geopolitical issues or decisions that could drastically affect our economy without extensive research from multiple sources? No one is able to do that, and no one ever will. Now, think about how many of us rail against opinions that differ from our own ideas on how the world works. Sure, a lot of the time we have a right to be outraged, but we’re all guilty of occasionally spouting off about things that we don’t really know all that much about.
The takeaway from this article is that all of us need to not only seek out a large number of varied opinions, we need to make sure we understand them. We need to voice our concerns and opinions as much as we can, but we need to make sure that the driving force behind our ideas is knowledge and not outrage or fear. If we can’t do that, we’ll quickly become the people that we all hate the most.
Featured image by Martha Soukoup via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
