As we embark upon another Presidential election in this highly polarized political environment, we should be mindful of these passages from the book “Being Wrong” by Kathryn Schulz:
“Think about the accusation that people who disagree with us “don’t live in the real world.” What we really mean is that they don’t live in our model of the world; they don’t share our vision of how things are. By failing to see the world as we do, they actually are undermining its reality and threatening its destruction – at least, unto us. But, of course, we are doing the same to them. Implicitly or explicitly, we are denying that they possess the same intellectual and moral faculties that we do – and denying, too, the significance and value of their life experiences, from which, inevitably, many of their beliefs arise.
We assume that other people are ignorant because we assume that we are not; we think we know the facts and we think those facts determine our beliefs. Put differently, we think the evidence is on our side.”
So as we debate issues in this forum, let’s remember that someone with a view different from ours isn’t necessarily ignorant.