Opposing and abrasive points of view can be annoying, but what can they teach us?
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I recently posted a TED Talk about addiction on my Facebook timeline. A friend shared the link and I noticed a comment that said, “I’ve left some thoughts on your page.” I had a feeling the “thoughts” were negative. My friend and I are political opposites, so I was curious to see what her friend said about the video.
“You can’t intellectualize addiction,” the commenter wrote. I rolled my eyes. If by intellectualize he means, study, research, test and verify results, um … that’s pretty much how we figure stuff out. Otherwise, we’d go back to the dark ages.
“Yep, you’ve got a fever. Throw some leaches on there and that oughta do it.”
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I’ve had friends that were so offensive I received private messages from other friends begging me to block them.
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We all have those friends trolling our timelines. Those idiots who make irrational comments, outrageous statements and passive aggressive jabs at something we said. Those people can’t seem to take a joke. The worst are the ones who make defensive comments about something that had nothing to do with them, or the content, in the first place. I’ve had friends that were so offensive I received private messages from other friends begging me to block them.
Here’s why I don’t:
We are deeply polarized as a society. There is a lot of flag waving, meme posting and rhetoric yelling that happens between political parties, races, religions and genders. And we all think we’re right. “If you saw it my way, you’d understand … and you wouldn’t be stupid,” we reason. But we never stop talking long enough to wonder how or why a person believes the way he or she believes. We certainly don’t think to ask what led that person to those conclusions.
We also mostly surround ourselves with like-minded people. We reaffirm each other’s beliefs, pat our virtual selves on the back and encourage our rightness. Harvard law professor, Cass Sunstein, and author of Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter, did an experiment. He gathered a diverse group of liberals in Boulder, Colorado and a diverse group of conservatives in Colorado Springs. He found that speaking with individuals in each of the groups allowed for a more open dialogue about topics such as climate change, same-sex relations and affirmative action. Once the groups got together, they moved, as a group, further left (liberals) and further right (conservatives). He found that the most extreme members of these groups led the entire group to a more extreme position.
As a writer, I’ll confess that it feels great to have my friends and colleagues share my articles, posts and book excerpts. It makes me feel like everything I do and say is true and correct. What it doesn’t do is challenge me to grow.
I’ve learned a great deal of self-control from people who disagree with me. Sometimes that means I have to think about what was said. Other times, I ignore what was said, or better yet, I ask questions: What did you mean by that? Why do you feel that way? What is your experience? Please explain what you’re saying so I understand you better.
We can empathize and sympathize with others and their experiences, but we will never have lived in their shoes.
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As human beings, our own lives are the only ones we can experience first hand. We can empathize and sympathize with others and their experiences, but we will never have lived in their shoes. In my speeches, I sometimes use the analogy that a human being is like a box.
We come from different places and carry in each of us experiences that no one else will completely understand. We see and experience the world in ways that are unique to us. The only way we have a shot at understanding what it’s like to be another person, is to share our experiences, or transfer the knowledge like moving the contents of one box into another.
I have a vast amount of experience as both a political conservative and a Christian fundamentalist. The journey I’ve taken that’s led me away from those ideologies was a long one. In fact, it took decades. I’ve had to realize during many conversations with friends and family who still hold those points of view that they haven’t traveled down my road, or gone through the mental metamorphosis of the same experiences. I cannot speak to them as though we are on the same page, nor belittle them for not seeing my point of view as clearly.
We will NEVER change someone’s mind by simply posting pithy statements on social media. Our convictions and beliefs are a complex system of neurological wiring. If it were that easy to get someone to change his or her mind, the fields of corporate training and change management would be irrelevant. I’ve made a very good living at both.
Like getting someone to push a different button on a computer, I’ve learned that the person’s inability, or lack of cooperation, is not a personal offense against me. Some statements may sound that way, but more often than not, a person’s defensiveness has to do with his own insecurities.
I’ve also discovered that there are three kinds of people: early adopters of change, slow adopters of change, and those who will never change no matter what anyone else says or does. These are the same people reading our posts and commenting on our pages. So why bother with the latter?
Private conversations have unwrapped belligerent statements and revealed deep truths that I otherwise would not have found.
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Private conversations have unwrapped belligerent statements and revealed deep truths that I otherwise would not have found. To do that, I’ve had to set my feelings aside and make humble attempts at allowing the other person to reveal his or her own humanness. I’ve often found buried treasure troves of wisdom.
Certainly, there are times when the best response to is to block someone. I don’t allow overt sexual posts on my timeline, or excessive profanity. I also don’t allow someone to attack me, or my family. I delete posts that I know will hurt someone’s feelings, such as when I’ve written an article about someone and his appearance is attacked. In general, I don’t allow negativity for negativity’s sake. Then again, I avoid posting negativity and personal conversations are just that: personal.
I’m a firm believer in surrounding ourselves with positive experiences. Sometimes, positive experiences come from uncomfortable interactions and from people with whom we have little in common, or don’t exactly see eye to eye. Rather than brushing them off and shutting them down, dig a little deeper and see if there are any pearls of wisdom to be found.
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Photo – Flickr/ Jonno Witts
I don’t delete/block for opposing views.
I delete/block for any type of view that is hateful or harmful. I don’t really want to be friends with people who are jerks.
For example, dear author, if you were still the leader of the “ex-gay” movement, you’d get my boot for promoting harmful quackery that causes a great deal of psychological damage without even fixing the perceived problem.
As tempting as it is to block and/or unfriend those with such views, it is sometimes possible to at least steer the conversation around to a place of mutual respect. Not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it can happen. It requires a lot of patience and a big dose of humility and empathy. Some people are simply trolls, mired in their own swamp of negative emotion, and truly for these people, a tractor could not extract them from the toxic sludge of their own hate filled construct. However, I think that it is important to be able… Read more »