Why the world can be black and white

A dispassionate rant

After reading online discourse on several world events that have taken place, most people’s stances on these have been, frustrating, in my opinion. In today’s time, most ‘reasonable people’ seem biased towards always picking a neutral stance, not having completely one-sided beliefs, whether it’s them fearing they’d not be able to defend all the actions or they believe picking the neutral ground makes them seem more intellectual, I’m not sure. But I strongly believe for certain ‘exceptional’ cases, it’s probably better to pick a side.

Picking no side is basically an attempt at appeasing both sides while simultaneously infuriating them. Initially, I used to believe it was a noble attempt at seeming morally superior and flush of biases and prejudices that influence people, but I’m not so sure anymore.

In my opinion, Harari says it perfectly,

“As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it – and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. Therefore, if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better try your luck with chimps.”

When two fundamentally opposing opinions come together, we’re primarily focused on shooting the other one down and ensuring to get everyone to believe we’re correct, the truth be damned. (sample size, most conversations I’ve had online, not a good sample set I know) We like to believe we’re all logical creatures, that we’re capable of thought and reasoning, so why do we automatically come to the conclusion that it’s better to simply enforce our views rather than accept that we might be wrong and try to find what the truth is?

Going off on a tangent, as someone who believes he’s reasonably open to changing his beliefs when presented with evidence, I find it pretty frustrating when someone’s willing to even read, let alone consider opinions contrary to their previous beliefs of how the world works. The only options here are to either understand that it’s a lost cause or try to bait them(which I do not recommend as a productive use of your time) Honestly I believe someone with the exact opposite of your beliefs, moral or otherwise, but open to discussing them is a much better person to have around than another run of the mill person who has the same ideas most of society shares but is unable to reason why outside of a few vanilla assertions (Shout out to Peter Thiel’s question: “What is something very few people agree with you on?”).

I fear we as a society are gravitating towards sticking to what the overwhelming majority believes(a novel idea I know) and are increasingly unwilling to figure out what we should believe on our own.

I’d be super happy to hear from people who think otherwise! Let me know why you think a gray area is a better place to be.