Intelligent people seek out opposing views and ideas, and then analyze.
Cults cut off opposing views quickly, working to remove abstract thought, not only for themselves, but for others as well.
And one can pat themselves on the back and be cheered on by the fellow groupthink for cancelling opposing views, but it doesn’t change that its selfish and arrogant, and a missed opportunity to teach our children how to analyze information.
I get we have become products of an algorithm. Products of seeing our ideas reinforced ad naseum, even if they are awful. Challenging oneself is hard, especially when there is no shortage in our feed telling us how smart we are.
As someone who sacrificed family, friends and major aspects of life to fight to hear different views and challenge what I was taught, it’s depressing seeing this happen. You either fight for ideas and opposing views to be shared and analyzed, or you exist in the comfort of the likeminded, all reassuring each other of their moral superiority, eagerly supported by an algorithm that would cuddle you in a warm blanket.
History isn’t fact. We like to think it is, we add weight to our own beliefs by calling what we accept as facts while minimizing opposing views. But history is actually a collection of memories, recorded in inexact fashion, pieced together to form a narrative. A large amount of what we were taught in school wasn’t entirely true, or at least very much out of context.
Genuine historians are starving for more information, more ideas, more theories. There are countless updates of ‘what really happened’ in history, from Paul Revere to African slavery to how the bible was written. And this is a product of open-minded people taking in more and more information: the smartest among us never speak in absolutes; it’s simply what we have concluded at this point based on the information provided.
We would be far greater as a nation if we replaced fighting to keep out information and views we don’t like with teaching our children how to analyze other views and ideas. How to fact check and study. And to still be open to the information we have changing.
I’m against the banning of most books as students should have access to age-appropriate ideas. I don’t want them denied access to information, as I was as a child; I want them to learn how to analyze the information provided, to hear opposing opinions while knowing they are simply another’s views.
So even as some pat themselves on the back for cancelling a visit from Linda McMahon, and are surrounded by the groupthink that would praise them for it, I wonder if they would feel the same when the school library bans Linda McMahon‘s book, or any book from anyone in the Trump administration. I wonder if they will protest including Trumps memoir next to Obama’s and Clintons on the elementary school library shelf. If one can publicly hate censorship while actively working to censor opposing ideas, and believing that their own view should limit, not just themselves, but others’ freedom to hear such ideas.
I know you will tell yourself you are protecting your kids. My parents thought the same.
But you are not. You are making them weaker. Kids who can’t handle abstract thought, cant handle opposing views, kids who are not open to new ideas. Its free speech only for those we agree with, its not free speech. And I feel awful for the educators that work to have these kids hear different views, to learn how to analyze information, to validate what they hear prior to acceptance, only to be fought by parents whose only acceptable outcome is that their children grow up to think and act exactly like them without challenging anything.