Open-mindedness
I feel very much like the author of this excellent video clip.
How often do you feel pushed by someone into buying a story? You’re surely familiar with quotes like “politician X is a crook”, “take/drink Y it will make your problems go away”, “Supreme being Z will love and protect you if you love and worship it”, etc.
You surely have experienced that some people have great expectations from others to accept their statements, assertions, or worse yet, a belief system, for granted, i.e. without any convincing arguments or a rational discussion. Such experiences have become much more frequent in the age of Internet since there’s way too much information than a mortal is able to process and verify on a case-by-case basis. Therefore, to protect ourselves from an onslaught of inconsistent information and arguments we tend to develop our belief systems and filters, some people do it more (sceptics?) and some people less (believers?).
Once upon a time… before Internet ;-) I clearly remember how I tended to occasionally get into flame wars of different kinds. I remember how convinced I was in my arguments regardless how realistically I had little possibility to verify those arguments and reaffirm/reevaluate my conclusions about the given topic or important question. In my defense I could only say that at least I was constantly trying to improve my belief system, the system centered around rationality and the premise that everything can be explained given enough convincing, irrefutable arguments. Thankfully, when you’re brought up under a value system, that is much harder to modify, it easier to go through a reassessment of self without pain and struggle. My value system was pretty good, although it needs some improvement and occasional maintenance. :-)
Today, having had enough experience with different sort of people, I can thin slice various situations and people while having in mind that the Earth is moving, things (and rarely so, people too) are changing.
Anyway, back to the people eliciting an accepting reactions. Such people do not even annoy me anymore - I tend to believe such people do not have their systems in check. Sometimes I consider it irresponsible when someone is pushing some far-flung or wild ideas to others who usually do not have the capacity, experience or mental resources to easily identify holes in the story. For some reason, Church pops in my mind.
This video should help you identify more easily such people and situations.
Once you give it a thought, you realize that most of such blindly-believing people are actually not dangerous to their peers… if their peers wear their mind protection cloak, that is. You realize that those people are actually seeking attention, love and compassion (“accept me regardless how off-track I am”). I also learned that people are hard to change, and it becomes exponentially harder (hard to measure like this but hey - you know what I mean) as one grows older. Therefore, since time is limited my advice to you:
You should try to rectify someone’s delusion only when you really care about that person and you consciously know that you can influence that person’s belief system given enough time, energy and commitment.
But you knew that already, right?
Nuff said, watch the video if you haven’t already - it’s a keeper!
