Social media make it incredibly quick and easy for any of us to post our thoughts and opinions on, well, anything. Easy often translates to lazy or without much thought, as the seemingly endless parade of celebrities who have their ill-conceived or foot-in-mouth social media shares excoriated by the public. While most of us don’t personally know too many celebrities, we do have friends who have exhibited the same sort of behavior.
If you are at a dinner party or similar gathering, and you offer an opinion, those to whom you offered it would probably not think much of you if you then informed them that you only wanted to hear them respond if they agreed wholeheartedly with you. This, however, is not uncommon on social media. People often treat social media as a broadcasting system, where they can share with everyone in their circle what they think in an unidirectional manner. In other words, “I get to tell you what I think, feel and believe, but I don’t want you to respond. Unless, of course, you agree with me.”
This stems from the notion that each of us is entitled to his or her opinion. To which, I reply, as I have in this site’s about page:
Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. — Harlan Ellison
Disagree if you wish, but realize that doing so requires you word-smith what it means to be “entitled” to your opinion. No one knows what’s rattling around inside your head until it makes an appearance. By stating your opinion, you’re making a demand on my time and attention. If you want me to pay any attention to your opinion, you should accept that I will expect it have some substance, rationality, validity and foundation. You’re not entitled to take up my time and attention and decide that I don’t get to do the same with my response. Ironically, that is exactly the mindset exhibited by many who demand the unidirectionality of opinion, but lets not digress.
Why do we witness this behavior? Why are people more inclined to refuse to hear rebuttal than to defend their statements? Laziness is certainly a factor. So is the fact that many people are quick to opine based on the first information they receive, and to try and defend that first opinion despite subsequent contrary evidence. The latter is a form of confirmation bias, and when people put their opinions out, they’re likely to resist having to admit error. The aforementioned ease of sharing thoughts and opinions greatly exacerbates the probability of putting forth a poorly reasoned thought.
That’s not the entirety of the problem, though. People who have a well-developed sense of intellectual rigor, a history of having their views challenged and having defended those views against challenge, are less likely to shy away from social media confrontation. If you grew up in an environment where you were taught to think critically by having your assertions rationally challenged, you’ll be more confident in engaging in debate. Unfortunately, our coddling society, our embrace of everyone’s a winner, and our lack of interest in teaching children how to think in favor of inculcating in them what to think, has produced generations of entitled but intellectually bereft opiners and whiners. If one’s opinions are never challenged, one will start to think that those opinions are valid simply because they exist.
This is how children think. This is how undeveloped and untrained brains think. This is why children are presumed under their parents’ authority and care until an age of majority. It is also why children get educated. Brains, like muscles, need both supply/nourishment and exercise to function better. We supply our muscles with building blocks by eating food. We make them functional by exercising. We supply our brains with building blocks with knowledge. We make them functional by exercising. Brain exercise involves not just recollection of knowledge, but the manipulation of that knowledge into ideas, hypotheses, conclusions, beliefs and opinions. Just as our muscles improve by being stressed, our mental skill improves by being stressed. When we defend opinions against challenges, we get better at forming defensible opinions. Conversely, if we never have to defend opinions, the opinions we form may have little or no objective validity, simply because we haven’t learned how to think.
Just as someone who’s never learned how to fight is more likely to respond with fear or skittishness in the face of physical aggression, someone who’s mentally unprepared and untrained is more likely to be reluctant to engage in debate. Children seek protection from their parents against physical aggressors, a natural and evolutionarily prudent tendency. Who, however, can protect intellectual children (aka brain-babies) from challenge, from aggressors? Some other authority figure, obviously. Many of these brain-babies are, of course, our college-age and college-attending adults, some of whom will be our nation’s future leaders and Best-and-Brighest. Despite being immersed in an environment whose purported purpose is brain-training, they demand that they be protected from aggression, from the sorts of critical challenges that would train their brains and develop the mental muscles that create hypotheses, conclusions, and opinions. They demand safe spaces. And they get them.
Once in the real world, these coddled brain-babies with no experience in standing up to contrary opinions retreat to the only mechanisms they have: demands that they not be challenged. They won’t quite put it that way, couching it instead in the language of modern social justice, but it really is that simple. We’ve infantilized our younger generations to the point where many can’t even defend the opinions they loudly proclaim. As a result, they recoil from challenge and they seek protectors from those who make them feel uncomfortable. Those protectors are sometimes authority figures, but oftentimes are merely a large number of their own. There’s safety in numbers, there’s reduced risk in a herd. Of course, those who don’t keep up with the herd are oftentimes left behind as sacrifices, which may keep those still in the herd “safe” but which certainly make those sacrifices feel betrayed. Those sacrifices, utterly untrained to defend themselves, may not be physically lost to the world, but they’re intellectual driftwood, abandoned and forgotten.
Most of us have heard the United Negro College Fund’s slogan “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” It’s a timeless observation, but it’s one that is increasingly unheeded by a society that chooses to coddle rather than challenge its young.
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