Thinking Rationally
Some years ago I posted a message on a bulletin board about the Home Shopping Channel on pay TV. When pay TV was first introduced into Australia the HSC was part of the extra channels that required an additional fee. I said this was absurd as it was like charging people admission to your shop. The response surprised me. A number of postings saying I must be a complete idiot for watching the HSC (not that I did say I watched it), others that pay TV would be better of without it and so on. No one answered my actual point. Unfortunately, this lack of thinking is endemic today. Instead of using reason, words are simply triggers that fire off emotional responses.
Some years ago a friend of mine was reading the newspaper about a large strike
that was going on and that a trade union was disassociating themselves from
it. He made the comment that in order to succeed the workers must stick together.
Now a casual observer may have interpreted that as a support for the strike
or sympathy with the workers cause. In fact, it was a simple statement of fact
and didn't reflect his own views on the strike or the worker’s situation.
On a TV program called ‘The Panel’, they interviewed a person who campaigns
in the USA against capital punishment. One of the members of the panel asked
him if he knew of any arguments in favour of capital punishment, to which he
replied that he didn't ‘Nor do I’ said the panelist. My take on this is that
if you think your opinions through then you should be well aware of all opinions
to the contrary, otherwise you can’t have considered them when forming your
own opinion. You should be able to put up a good argument for an opinion that
is the opposite to your own. This man spent his time campaigning for a view
that he hadn't thought through rationally and even seemed proud of the fact,
as was the panelist. It was an opinion based on emotion, not rationality.
This isn't to say that emotion shouldn't be part of the view. I mentioned before
(‘TV Morality’) that morals must be considered in their full context. This is
another aspect of that. If you don't think your views through rationally then
you are wide open to being manipulated by people who will use your emotional
responses to suit their own ends. And there are many such groups. I've pointed
out before that much of what is passed off as compassion is simply based on
guilt.
People sometimes make the comment that the world is not black and white but
has shades of gray. I find this quite amusing. My world is many coloured and
multidimensional, and what we see is only a very small part of the picture.
