The Nuances of Reason
Throughout most of my life I have tried hard to look at situations with a “liberal mind”. Unfortunately in this age of information overload, raw and copious opinions and a clear cut division between the tribes to the left and the tribes to the right I find myself needing to take a new approach based on my own research, as many facts as I can find and statistics as opposed to old biases and emotional responses.
I hold many opinions and biases which I now admit cannot in actual fact always be substantiated. While I believe that I want the best for humankind and also believe that I am tolerant, relatively caring and knowledgable I find myself at the ripe old age of 68 feeling a need to re-assess the method by which I reach my conclusions and illations.
In recent times I have become more aware of the manipulations that tech companies apply to their algorithms to either influence the opinions or the buying power of the people they are targeting. And let’s call a spade a spade. I am gathering most of my information from sources on the internet.
As such I now have to be very careful when I read or view opinion pieces about politics, religion, people, viewpoints and on the list goes.
Even if I use statistics to base my decisions on I still have to make certain that the source of the figures is not biased in one direction because stats can be easily manipulated to give a false picture.
Having said that I have spent a good percentage of my life working out what I believe to be right or wrong based on my own observations and got by.
It’s just that in this day and age the source of the information informs my opinions based on it’s own biases.
Without getting too complicated I have decided that left and right allegiances are no longer relevant to me.To be fair to myself and consequently to others who I may influence I no longer identify as a left leaning person and certainly not a right leaning person either.
I have come to a point in my life when I need to re-assess my opinions based on my current research as opposed to my historical approach of believing that anyone who has a conservative or controversial viewpoint is automatically wrong.
What I have noticed about myself is that if I can get enough data in place. By this I mean historical, current, contrary facts, observation of the people involved and so forth I can eventually make a decision that I feel comfortable with because things start falling into place like a huge jigsaw puzzle. If a piece doesn’t fit I can then work out why.
There are too many uneducated opinions floating around and they are mainly based on emotional responses and the nuances of how they are presented to the observer.
So unless I feel confident that I can present a strong argument I will now keep my opinions to myself.
