I watch all sorts of things on YouTube.
Most of the time, though, I tend to watch interviews and talk show/debate type stuff. Well, perhaps "watch" is an overstatement... I turn them on and let them play in the background while I'm doing other things.
In the course of a given month — or maybe a given quarter — it's likely that I will have watched Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson, and The Young Turks, and Trevor Noah, and Piers Morgan, and Ben Shapiro and many others.
A few reading this particular line up might notice that the above cover a pretty broad swath of political and philosophical views. And that's the whole point here.
This world we live in seems to have become increasingly centered around people sticking within their tightly shuttered — and often extreme — echo chambers, only exposing themselves to information and points of views that are aligned with their own.
But how on earth can you hope to learn anything if you are only talking to people who agree with you?
Maybe that touches on some of the issues we have in the world: people seem to be less and less inclined to want to have their perceptions challenged and their minds stretched. Instead we seem to lull ourselves to sleep inside our comfortable "cocoons of agreement." And then we end up horrified when we encounter something that is radically different from how we perceive things and act with outrage and essentially want to silence those who think differently.
What brought on this line of thinking to my blog?
I was reading a couple of articles about so-called inclusiveness and the way language is being changed and defined at institutions of higher learning across the USA... and likely the rest of the world.
Call me silly here, but isn't the entire purpose of going to university to learn how to think and how to have your viewpoints challenged so that you can form your own opinions out of a widely accumulated basket of opinions and possibilities?
I guess I've never really been upset by people around me having different viewpoints from my own — in fact, most do — and I am more upset by those who don't seem able to formulate a thought of their own, instead resorting to merely regurgitating what a particular group or affiliation has to offer without actually looking into the deeper meaning behind what that group stands for and/or espouses.
To be honest, it's something that started bothering me when I was at university, and that was going on 40 years ago.
For example, I'm not really concerned with whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or something else, what I'm interested in is why you are those things. And how your personal experience is directly informed by following whatever group it is you follow.
Believe in God? That's awesome! But how did you arrive at that particular outcome? Did you have an actual personal experience or are you mainly regurgitating what your family has been saying for generations?
I studied a lot of psychology when I was in college.
One of the things I perhaps most took away from those studies was the fact that in the majority of cases — except maybe when you're joining an interest group rather than a political or philosophical group — people are actually more invested in being able to "hand off responsibility for their own thoughts" to a group, rather than asking their own questions and then being accountable for the answers to those questions.
Which brings me full circle back to where we started...
Take a fairly well known personality like Jordan Peterson. I'm by no figment of anyone's imagination much of a fan of his, but I am a big fan of his seemingly fearless way of always being open about what he thinks and believes. Whenever I listen to him either talk or being interviewed by somebody else, the one thing I feel confident in is that I am hearing his views not a canned version of groupthink.
And that, perhaps is the true act of courage in this world of ours.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of your weekend!
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Created at 2023-04-01 23:04 PST
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