(Stuff we already know)
We Have Forgotten What It Means
to be Citizens of Democracy!
Democracy Requires That
We See All Sides of Every Issue.
We have forgotten what it means
to be human and to understand reality.
Being Human Requires an open mind
that is seeking to understand; seeing all sides.
Remember: none of us is right, we are all wrong,
because we are imperfect, puny human beings.
What is this clamoring that
I AM RIGHT! THUS YOU ARE WRONG!?!?
All learning begins with the acknowledgement that I DON’T KNOW!
IF I ALREADY KNOW… I CAN NO LONGER LEARN.
If your understanding of this world only comes from one source,
then know this, you do not understand this world.
A one-sided viewpoint is not real or true.
Bias is constantly distorting our thinking,
every moment of every day.
Therefore when the “reality” I speak of comes only from
my opinion, perspective, politics, beliefs, or bubble,
It is not reality. Opinions are opinions. Reality is reality.
Opinions are one-sided. Reality is all-sided.
Reality encompasses the complexity of all sides.
In a democracy, it is absolutely necessary to see all sides
Democracy is built on the tension between opposite viewpoints.
The value of democracy is in the struggle of that tension.
Democracy never begins with the right answer,
this world is far too complex for that.
It begins with the questions and the needs of the people.
Better decisions are made beginning from diverse perspectives.
Otherwise it is an autocracy or dictatorship.
So when we narrow our source of reality to one perspective,
then we are no longer democratic.
We begin with diverse perspectives
and then seek reconcilian through consensus of those perspectives,
which gives better answers, solutions, and legislation.
When we seek division and segregation,
Democracy is no more.
Then this great experiment fails.
It is clear that, in the state of dividedness we are in and that we apparently want,
democracy has failed; until we begin to do the work of seeing the issues from all sides so we can reconcile differences enough to make democratic decisions. To begin, we must first admit that
if we are not seeking a balanced view,
then we are satisfied with a biased view.
We have forgotten that democracy is not about what “I want” or “I think” or “I believe”. It is not about the ideology and beliefs of any group. It is solely about the common good of “We the people”. All the people. It is not all about ME! Never has been. Never will be. Because then it is no more a democracy. The definition of autocracy is rule by one person with total power. Democracy is not ME-ocracy.
Unbalanced News
Recently I had a short political conversation with people that I care about. We sort of stumbled into it. Generally, I try to “not go there” because I know how different our understanding and experience of the world is. But here’s the gist of it.
Person one told a story about some military personnel that he saw in a news clip. We were all proud of what they had done. But then this person’s true feelings came out saying how upsetting it is that people do not appreciate our military. This is something he has been hearing on the news that was pointing fingers of false accusations at the “other side”.
I didn’t follow up on that right away because I was puzzled and had no idea where that statement came from. I don’t know anyone that disrespects our people in the military.
As the conversation of current events continued, I too reiterated how I appreciate people in the military, even more so since I have had a son that spent 8 years in the Navy.
Person two then added a piece that brought out the whole story. She said that she just doesn’t understand how we can be taking down all of those monuments and “erasing America’s history” and dishonoring our military.
Whoa. That blew my mind and then I put the pieces together and asked if she knew anything about the monuments and statues that are being removed. She had no idea because all of her information comes from Fox News. They used the monuments to generate anger and hate toward the military by accusing the “other side” without telling the whole story. I explained that the only monuments that are being taken down are the civil war confederacy war heros. Then I explained that the confederacy was the enemies and traitors of the United States during the Civil War that killed more of our soldiers than all of the wars in America's history combined. These are monuments to the enemies of President Lincoln, our Congress, our government, and our Union Army that was fighting to uphold the new antislavery laws of America and to prevent the confederacy from splitting our country in two. Those monuments represent traitors, not heros, to the United states. It is mind boggled how they were even allowed to be put up since those monuments are what is dishonoring our soldiers in the civil war and all of those that died fighting for freedom and unity. It is like dishonoring our country by putting up monuments to Sadam Heusein after the Iraq war or of Hitler after WW2 or of Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 towers killed 2996 Americans. No! Unthinkable! We would never dishonor American history that way. Instead we honor our soldiers in each of those wars and we build a memorial to all of the people that lost their lives after 9/11 and each war.
The response was a very stunned and emotional reaction of, “I didn’t know that!” A while later I was asked what news they should watch. I gave a very lame answer that we must find a whole variety of perspectives so we understand the issues. But how in the world does the average person do that without doing hours of research??? I realized that even though I spend an hour or two per day trying to understand the news, I have some work to do to organize my own news gathering in a way that I can give a not-so-lame answer.
Tools for Serious Citizens of Democracy
Instead of only seeking out news that says what we want it to say, we must seek out news sources that give us multiple perspectives on every issue. It is obvious that we all understand our own perspectives and opinions. What we are ignorant of is what other people are thinking and seeing and believing.
Here is an option to consider, if you are serious about being a good citizen of democracy. I’m sure there are more tools like this out there. I’ll keep looking and will post anything I find that seems valuable to this blog post.
All Sides -- Unbiased Balanced News This gives you news from all sides. Each issue presented by news sources that are labeled as Left -- Center -- Right. It makes it easy to understand “all sides” of the issues which is what is needed if we would like to be a healthy democracy rather than the failed democracy that we are now. It also gives you media bias ratings and charts that show how reliable and how biased a news source tends to be. These ratings are constantly being updated by those that use the sight, ordinary citizens like you and me.
There are two convenient ways to stay connected.
There is an email list that is sent every week listing a whole variety of news articles. It is on the front page of the website toward the top All Sides -- Unbiased Balanced News
There is also a list of social media sites where you can “like” all sides on facebook https://www.facebook.com/AllSidesNow, twitter https://twitter.com/AllSidesNow, and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/allsidesnow/.
I’ve been using All Sides more lately but before that I spent about an hour a day going through 8 to 10 news sources, reading the headlines, and then digging into the issues of interest. This is not a very efficient way of doing it but I knew I had to do something, anything, other than getting stuck on one perspective. I use my phone and download all the news apps that I want to keep up with and then set the notifications so I can review them quickly or more in depth. Notifications on the phone then pop up throughout the day so I can keep up.
Confirmation Bias
One of the reasons we find it so hard to get out of our ingrained ways of thinking is that our thinking is naturally and automatically geared toward confirmation bias. We see and listen to the things that confirm what we already believe or know. Why?
Nobody wants to be wrong even though they are not right.
Everyone wants to be right even though they are wrong.
We are stuck in a deep seated problem of our own thinking.
The only way out of this is to daily force ourselves to think and see different.
Reality must be seen from all sides. One-sided reality is not reality. It may be illusions and lies, propaganda and conditioning; but it is not true or real.
It takes constant daily effort to get unstuck, to see beyond the end or our own noses.
I call this practice: discerning truth. It is a lot of work; both inner work and outer work. Internal and external. Confirmation bias is coming at us from every direction; the left and the right, inside us and outside us, above and beneath. Discerning truth is a discipline that is spiritual, individual, social, religious, political; a democratic discipline that is required for citizens of democracy so it will not continue to fail.
I see two main reasons that we are like this.
Our drive to be right and certain is all encompassing and overpowering. How often do you want to be right in a disagreement, whether you are right or not, especially in the middle of the night. Our brains are constantly seeking domination above the “other” or the “different”. It is a survival instinct left over from ages past. We learned to fear the other, which is anything that is different. Because we fear that which we don’t understand.
We want to think we know it all. But our limited thinking cannot contain all of reality or all of truth. Our puny minds think they can but we are nothing but a grain of sand in this universe. It is our own fallibility and lack of perfection that often subconsciously eats away at us. And so we keep looking for anything and everything that will confirm our biases, opinions, beliefs, viewpoints, and thinking. Little do we know that thought is the culprit. David Bohm, a quantum physicist that also studies and wrote books about language, communication, and thought made a statement that keeps going deeper and deeper in me. “Thought creates the world, then says, ‘I didn’t do it!’”
Like it or not,
we are hardwired to be wrong;
unless we do the inner work it takes to discern truth.
Like it or not,
we see only what we want to see,
we hear only what we want to hear,
we see only what we are looking for,
we hear only what we are listening for.
This is who we have become through conditioning and a myriad of influences that are shaping us.
This is not who we are or who we are meant to be.
Seeing one-sided reality is the way of ignorance and laziness.
Do we not want to understand what is real?
“Each of us creates a picture of our world by connecting a dozen or so of the trillions of dots that would need to be connected to make a ‘true’ portrait of the universe.” — Sam Keen
See Opinionation
Storytime: This parable illustrates a truth;
a lesson so simple, so obvious, so prevalent, so familiar.
So familiar that we cease noticing it.
So simple that yes, we can get unstuck
and learn to see all sides.
Shamefully, America is acting like we are all blind and ignorant and yet yelling about being right, when really we are stuck in the muck of our one perspective just like the blindmen and the elephant.
We are stubborn and too lazy to relearn and rehumanize so we can be citizens in a democracy again, so we can be human again.
One-sided democracy is nothing but an autocracy.
The Blind Men and the Elephant
by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)
It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation Might satisfy his mind.
The First approached the Elephant, And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side, At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant Is very like a WALL!"
The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, "Ho, what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a SPEAR!"
The Third approached the animal, And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands, Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant Is very like a SNAKE!"
The Fourth reached out an eager hand, And felt about the knee
"What most this wondrous beast is like Is mighty plain," quoth he:
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a TREE!"
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most; Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant Is very like a FAN!"
The Sixth no sooner had begun About the beast to grope,
Than seizing on the swinging tail That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant Is very like a ROPE!"
And so these men of Indostan Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong!
Here are additional comments made by James Baldwin regarding this parable:
“Then the elephant moved on. The six blind men sat by the side of the road all day, and talked to each other about what they thought it looked like. They could not agree, and called each other bad names for thinking something different.
“Each believed that he knew the answer, but all were wrong because they only knew part of the truth. People who have eyes sometimes act just as foolishly.”
Anger and wrongness can be a powerful point of learning
As I realize that all of life is my teacher, one of my greatest teachers is my own hot buttons, my points of defendedness that evoke surprising, emotional reactions.
Often I stand there puzzled and confused asking myself, did I just do that or say that?
I feel it in my heart and in my stomach, especially in the middle of the night. And I’m learning that these buttons are my own areas of insecurity, uncertainty, and dissonance. They seem to be cracks in my facade. But isn’t THAT where the light gets in???
Anytime we desperately want something to be true, that is when we must be most suspect and most skeptical knowing how strong our drive to be right is. Confirmation bias is a formidable force that works in the shadows of our lives, constantly distorting truth. This is why discerning truth is so hard and so critical.
Whenever an ideology, political or religious, becomes elevated above human beings, it is an idolatrous elevation.
"The human longing for certainty in an uncertain world perhaps accounts for the idolatrous way in which some treat certain religious symbols.". (Jan M. Long)
"There is no real certainty until you burn;
if you wish for this,
sit down in the fire.”
You can lead a human to knowledge, but you can’t make it think!
“We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together as fools.” (ML King)
As Khalil Gibran wrote:
The sphinx spoke only once and said, “A desert is a grain of sand and a grain of sand is a desert ….let all else be silent.” Which means (despite our limited view) that as we begin to understand our slice of life, we also begin to understand life itself and vice versa.
No comments:
Post a Comment