All lies and jest, still the man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.
-The Boxer, Paul Simon
I'll just ponder as I wander here for a minute.
We as humans - well, perhaps I should keep it local - we as 21st-century Americans seem to love being validated in what we think. What I mean is, we love to hear our own ideas repeated to us, especially by someone with "authority" (read: a PhD), in order that we may again repeat the same idea to someone else who holds the same ideas that we do.
This is understandable. It's not easy to give an opposing worldview a fair shake, especially if that worldview is pumped out with a lot of aggressive rhetoric and propaganda. Each side will only choose to report that data which makes itself look good, and its opponent look bad. Thus, if you are on the same side, you'll cheer and clap; if you're on the other side, you'll fume and change the channel - and hopefully find some rhetoric you can cheer for.
All this seems incredibly obvious (a no-brainer, in fact), but at the same time I find it a little eerie to think about. Imagine that in this open-minded day and age, when quite a few people claim to hold any number of contradictory views in their heads at once, that there exist unbridgeable gulfs between minds - ideologies that have spawned whole industries, whose sole purpose is to validate themselves and to villify the opposing team. These industries produce periodicals, essays, media programs, studies, statistic-mills, and PhD's, all for the consumption of their adherants, all for the confirmation of a single line of thought.
What do you have here? What you have, essentially, is a titanic choir, and the preacher is preaching to it - the same sermon being fed to the same people who already believe it, who then proceed to repeat it amongst themselves. It's a closed circuit: nothing new gets in, nothing old gets out. It's mind-boggling, if you think about it.
"Now Rick," you protest (too much, methinks); "there are always new ideas - ideas are always being exchanged between peoples. Don't you agree?"
Well, yes and no. If you mean technologies, then yes, of course there are new ideas (and by technologies, what is really meant is innovations - these can be physical, technical, or spiritual). There are always innovations. But here's the rub: innovations are essentially new ways of doing the same damn thing. Even cars are just glorified legs. What you have is simply a logical progression, beginning with one basic need (i.e., transportation), going through several stages (i.e., buggies, cars, etc.) and ending with the most direct means (i.e., probably teleportation). The package may change, but what's inside the package remains essentially the same.
And as for the exchange of ideas, well, in order for one to receive a new idea, one must be open to that idea - and this requires a certain ideological framework. Yes, regardless of what one might think, one cannot long remain an open book, upon which any idea can be written - one guiding ideology will always take over. Those "open to new ideas" are simply those with a, shall we say, "hospitable mindset" - they will invite new ideas over, maybe get tips on how to brighten the decor, but when all is said and done the visiting ideologies will go home, and nothing will really change. The Open Mind is already a house, quite complete with all the comforts of home, and aside from a few superficial touches here and there, no changes will be made.
That's the thing that gets me. An Open Mind is really a mind open to open-minded ideas - if a closed-minded idea were to show up, it would be rejected at once. Thus an Open Mind cannot really communicate at all with a Closed Mind (don't you love these terms?), because the difference in ideology is simply to vast to leap across. One has to give way to the other, and usually neither will budge.
The point I'm trying to make here is that ideologies are caught in their own cycles of validation, and thus real discourse (at least of any real intellectual value) is useless. Ideology plugs up people's minds. Real, objective truth - and yes, there is such a thing (hang on, is that an ideological statement? I'm so confused...) - gets shouted down; people don't want to examine things from both sides and find what is true; there's no "reality check" to make people stand back and say, "Hey, wait a minute - this is going too far." Ideology becomes a kind of madness, out of step with reality.
Have there been attempts at bridging the gaps? Yes, but most of these are less than helpful. Usually it occurs between the more moderate/liberal members of the two groups - that is, the members of one group who are most like their group's opponents. Tell me if you've heard this one: they all get together in one room, read off a list of the things they can all agree on (dutifully ignoring their differences), then spend several hours saying nice things about each other, after which a memorandum is drawn up that says everyone is happy and they can all get along now, which then gets back to the prospective groups and is promptly rejected by both.
Why, you may ask?
The reason is, all those moderate/liberals from each party who agreed with each other were, in spirit, simply a third party unto themselves - they represented neither group; all they represented were themselves. That's the problem with this whole damn mess.
And so the hard-liners read their Hard-Line Report, which says how bad the liberal/moderates are with their soft, touchy-feely policies; and the liberal/moderates read their Liberal/Moderate Report, which details how cold and unfeeling the hard-liners are with their stonewalling and unwillingness to change. Appropriate graphs, tables, and histograms are provided, as well as photos of hard-liners enacting hard-line policies, and liberal/moderates enacting liberal/moderate policies. And the industries grind on, and the gaps widen, and people continue to drift ever further apart. And each one continues to hear what he wants to hear - in fact, actively seeks out what he wants to hear - and thus nothing really changes.
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