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Bias, Opinion and Other Distortions
Some folks thrive on controversy or contention; I don't.I'm
very grateful that even though I’ve been writing this column for
nearly seventeen years, in all that time, I’ve never had anyone
take me to task for my opinion. Not once. Well, there was that one time
when someone anonymously emailed me to let me know that my website was
a load of drivel and suggested that I should get a life. But this helpful
citizen didn’t specify any beef in particular. Maybe this is because
I’m not expressing my viewpoint with the intention of shoving
it down anyone else’s throat. You know what they say about opinions
- everybody’s got one. I respect that. I can have mine without
insisting anyone else agrees. Furthermore, I often have opinions that
I can easily keep to myself. I mentioned this fact once at a dinner
with friends and was promptly chided that I “should always express
my opinion”.
I didn’t agree, but I kept that to myself. Engaging
in a debate about whether or not one should always speak his/her mind
seemed somewhat fruitless. In actuality, debate is rarely fruitful anyway.Let's
face it, opinion is not fact. Truth is fact and there is always a “truth”
at the root of everything. Unfortunately many truths are vague though.
Others are completely obtuse. For the most part truth can be pretty
unexciting. Often it starts long before anyone noticed so the traces
or what lingers is all that can be evaluated. Some truths mankind is
just not smart enough to figure out. This doesn’t prevent the
great human minds from speculating, determining, deciding, theorizing,
teaching, expounding on and sometimes embracing as a cause even in the
complete absence of the truth.
There is a growing dark side to all this and it seems
to have been exacerbated by the technological phenomenon of Internet
chat groups/forums. Truth, and the quest to find it, is much less important
now than having an opinion, having a right to an opinion and the right
to agree to disagree, which is now the new civilized way to end heated
discussion just prior to gunfire. I don’t know, maybe the truth
of a matter has never been the quest. The Ancient Greeks, among numerous
other cultures, lived to debate ideals and philosophy which is not quite
the same thing as digging for the nuts and bolts reasons man behaves
the way he does. Sometimes it's just indigestion.
Maybe forming our opinions and clinging to them even
in the face of absolute evidence to the contrary is more rewarding somehow.
Maybe all the interaction available online now just exposes how pervasive
this fault line is in the human landscape. Truth is no longer, if ever
it was, the reason for having opinion. Opinion is its own reason for
being, the pinnacle of achievement. Form an opinion – defend it.
It might be skewed but, so what, the whole truth is likely to be much
less interesting, certainly less adrenalen activating. Stimulation rather
than edification seems to be the goal now.
Nevertheless, I am confounded by how little logic is
ever applied to the forming of opinion. We think we are so cerebral
but, in the end, we are just emotional beings. Opinions are largely
shaped by “feelings” not fact. And the touchy-feelier this
culture becomes, the farther away we drift from the love of truth, which
has always been a bad move – historically speaking. Completely
contemptable behavior, that flies in the face of the core truth of an
issue, is often perpetrated and justified, sometimes to the death. There
is nothing more dangerous than a fanatic with a biased, opinionated
cause. For example, fanatics will kill to support their opinion about
how wrong it to kill. From radical conservative Christians who think
it’s okay to blow up abortion clinics to radical Muslims who would
kill a nun in protest of the Pope quoting an ancient text that accuses
them of being violent. When these outrageous things happen, everyone
grabs their opinions and dashes for the corners, shouting those opinions
from safe distance, but no one asks, how convoluted is that? Where is
the truth in this behavior?
It’s pretty easy to stay out of controversy,
and thus stay out of the way of the fallout from fanatical opinion,
but nowadays, you have to keep a low profile to do it. If you’re
active on the Internet, you might as well get ready to defend yourself
sooner or later though, because there is hardly anything you can say,
no posture you can take, that isn’t going to offend someone else’s
finely devised, highly thought of opinion. When the day finally comes
that anything that offends another is punishable by imprisonment or
death, I’d like to hope that I’m in the hills somewhere–far
away from the madness. You might opine that this will never happen.
But it already is happening. That's the truth.
Of course, what do I know? This is just my opinion.
