Absolute Views are Lazy
Are you finding that now, more than ever before, people are taking absolute views—opinions that are extremely one-sided? Views from political opinions to health opinions, human behavior opinions, and spiritual opinions. Families, friends, and co-workers are now clashing over opinions that didn’t permeate relationships before. It frankly sucks.
I recently listened to several podcasts and read a book that provided some enlightenment and helped me identify part of why absolute views are so pervasive right now.
There are four reasons this new hyper-opinion trend is happening. It boils down to fear, laziness, a new cultural mandate, and media becoming an opinion business rather than an information business.
Absolute Views as a Result of Fear
Let’s start with fear. The main aspect here is your own comfort/insecurity with certainty. So often we get very different perspectives thrown at us and we start to wonder, ‘who should I believe?’ You can turn on two established TV networks, or read two different well know newspapers and get different ideas or even conclusions. Most people struggle with uncertainty, and how it creates a feeling of insecurity. They want a single answer. A strong opinion.
Because feeling and living securely is one of the strongest survival instincts we have, people gravitate to absolute and simple answers. Forming an absolute and resolute opinion alleviates fear and provides a feeling of security.
Why is Taking an Absolute View Lazy?
Everyone struggles with laziness at some point in life, I mean seriously, don’t we want to find a an easier way to do everything? It certainly applies to this subject as well. Let’s look at immigration at the border as an example. Two absolute views could be:
Everyone should be allowed to cross the border into the US, we are a nation of immigrants.
OR
No one should be allowed to cross the border into the US, because there could be dangerous people in those groups.
The reality is that the best policy is nuanced somewhere between these two absolutes—but that requires extensive research, analysis, time, and effort. The lazy option is just to grab onto the absolute view that aligns closest to our feelings about immigration. More often than not this information comes from short tweets and headlines Heads lines and tweets are loaded with bias and salacious wording to grab attention. The actually content is often buried half way or further into an article.
For me, a better “personnel”policy is that when your knowledge is thin on a subject, try to not take a strong and definitive opinion. How much you know about a subject should be directly proportional to the strength of your opinion and surety of that opinion.
How Cultural Mandates are Fueling Absolute Views
I can read five headlines from my favorite publications (headlines, not the complete article), and form an opinion. I see people doing this all the time. Or they take a tweet that’s a clip from an article and feel fully informed. I call this headline research. And then people go on to use the article as a defense of their absolute view.
In today’s culture, it seems like we’re forced to have an opinion. This is definitely a cultural shift. After all, no one wants to seem stupid and have no opinion.
It wasn’t like that for me in my 20s. Sure, we all had opinions on some subjects, but if you asked me back then about my opinion on immigration, or liberal vs conservative, on foreign policy, or what I thought about Russia or China, I’d easily and comfortably say I didn’t know and frankly didn’t care that much. I was focused on my career, my relationships, and weekend plans. Call it self-centered if you want, but I could hang out AND enjoy anybody back then.
A lot of 20-somethings now have absolute views on almost everything. Along with everyone older than 20.
Media as an Opinion Business
Again, when I was growing up, most newspapers and news programs gave mainly information, and fewer opinions and commentary. Even though opinion pieces were filled with bias, there was much less bias on the front pages.
Media companies today have figured out that high ratings and money is in opinion shows. This is great—I’m an unapologetic capitalist. However, I think the fact that commentary and biased opinions have found their way into mainstream articles reporting events and news is a problem.
Try taking your favorite newspaper and just reading the headlines. Do they have a bias or are they presenting information? Pay attention to the adjectives, and words that push a direction. We’re now experiencing an onslaught of commentary and opinions, not facts we can use to form an opinion.
I hope we can get back to being comfortable with not having a strong opinion when we are ill-informed or weekly informed. And if you’re only willing to read the headlines, I beg you all to please don’t use the headlines to form absolute views.
I can dream.
