When I was younger I would get into intense political and ideological discussions with various individuals from both sides of the aisle. And in America there are usually two sides to every aisle, always perfectly demonstrating the polarization that keeps “We the People” endlessly chasing our tails in tight little circles while our masters loot and pillage to no end.
I tend to be the devil’s advocate and will often take the other side of any discussion, if only to test how factually based and intellectually consistent the other person’s thinking is. No surprise here but they rarely are; unless (of course) they’re using their own unique set of facts to base their deeply flawed argument upon.
Often the ‘discussion’ would quickly devolve into minutiae when the other person is confronted with their own hypocrisy or inconsistency. I am always amazed how fiercely they will cling to some irrefutable ‘fact’ in their argument as if that little gem perfectly supported their entire cognitive fallacy.
I eventually learned to never underestimate the lengths to which people will go to believe precisely what they want to believe, facts or hypocrisy be damned. One guy actually had the gumption to tell me with a straight face that we lived in a free country and he was entitled to believe whatever he wanted to believe.
It doesn’t take a ‘free’ country to accomplish that my friend, just a terminally closed mind.
I used to think people simply would not view the world with an open mind. Then I thought people simply couldnot. Lately I’ve come to understand it’s a little bit of both, combined with a heaping dollop of a complete lack of critical thinking sprinkled liberally with deep denial and affirmation seeking. Once the pile of self deception and outright denial grows to critical proportions, the addled ‘thinker’ cannot concede any one point without conceding all points.
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