Were your opinions cultivated and curated,
nurtured with time and intention, or were they gifted to you whole by someone whose mind you trust? How willing are you to let someone challenge your beliefs? Honestly? Especially your core beliefs. If the thought is uncomfortable or threatening, it’s probably because we don’t do it often. We don’t even think about it. How precious are your opinions? How much protection do they need when someone says they’re wrong?
These aren’t academic questions. The brains in our skulls are a sacred trust. Humans are the only species in the known universe with the capacity for independent thought. As we’ve devised better and better ways of assessing objective truth (like science and journalism, which are two sides of the same coin) and as we find ourselves facing a moment in history where the survival of our civilization depends on clear-headed, evidence-based choices, each of us has a responsibility to hold our opinions and beliefs up to the light and force them to defend themselves.
Here are the rules. An opinion is only as valid as the outcome of its last challenge. If a belief hasn’t been challenged lately, it’s likely missing something. It’s likely getting soft and lazy. As thinking creatures who hold a world in our hands, it’s imperative we seek out, or at least be actively open to, opinions different from our own. Then they must be thrown into the cage of our minds, together, to fight it out.
It has to be a fair fight. Your carefully protected beliefs must be left to fend for themselves with no outside help, no handicaps. You are nothing more than a referee. You must listen to the opposition and hear it out completely. Then you must think. If your belief emerges from the cage victorious only because your thumb was on the scales, because you assumed it was correct and only half-listened to the logic of your opponent, then your opinion has been deprived of the chance to stand on its own feet. And that makes it worthless.
If your opinion objectively bears itself out, if the logic that gives it truth in your mind is stronger than the logic of its challenge, then congratulations. You’re on the right track. You’ve successfully set another spar on a strong intellectual framework. But it’s still only earned the right to fight another day, to survive until it must prove itself again. If it fails against an opponent that was stronger and more prepared, don’t mark that as a weakness or a failure. This is a road travelled by everyone, and none of us is born with the right answers. Take heart in the fact that your footing has become more solid, and that you have a new, better tool with which to face the world.
Maybe it’s an assumption about your economic system. You’ve been the recipient of the better end of the deal and you feel your good fortune was deterministic, a result of your past actions. Maybe bad fortune makes you feel the system is exploitative, and a different one is morally better. Maybe you hold an opinion so obvious that it’s common sense, needing no academics to reinforce it. Or it’s based on a personal experience so powerful and deep that there could be no alternate choice. None of this is good enough for a member of Homo sapiens. There’s too much at stake.
We need every person who crawls the surface of this planet and breathes its razor-thin atmosphere to have the sharpest, best tools with which to fix the mess we’ve created. Well-founded beliefs and reliable facts are the only defense against bottom-feeders who would misinform us for personal advantage at the expense of their species’ long-term health. We owe it to each other to demand more from ourselves and the humans around us.
The more we’ve learned and the more we feel we know, the easier it is to assume our opinions are unassailable, which is possibly the biggest trap of all. There are always sides we haven’t considered. Some have merit, some don’t. At some point we may hold core beliefs which have survived enough challenges that they don’t need to enter the cage so often, but that determination must be made carefully. It’s an easy abdication; that status must be earned.
The challenges can come from anywhere. They’re overheard in a restaurant. They’re read in the opinion columns, or shouted on talk radio. They’re spoken by someone you despise. Some of the best challenges come from those we despise, because those are the ones we ignore the fastest, and we know we’d feel the most threatened if they turned out to have merit.
We have to listen for these voices when we can. It gets easier with practice. There are objective truths to be known, to whatever extent we’re able to know them. The existence of our civilization requires we do our best to know them. So throw your beliefs into the cage. See what comes back out.
— Dave Coulter
11/17/2023
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