Why it is Important to Entertain Uncomfortable Ideas and Accept Uncomfortable Facts and Truths
So what if you choose not to listen to a Neo-Nazi justify his ideas? So what if you refuse to entertain ideas that contradict with your religious beliefs? So what if you support your political party’s ideas 100% no matter what? Depending on the idea, the costs can range from embarrassing to catastrophic.
Credibility
To some people, credibility still matters. If you are arguing for one side of an issue and you fail to acknowledge valid points by your opponent, or worse, outright reject valid points, you will lose any credibility you do have with your opponent and you are likely to lose credibility with the audience, as well. I recently heard a debate where one of the debaters was defending consequentialism as a moral theory. His opponent made the point that we rarely know the long-term consequences of our actions and most people are lousy at predicting even short-term human behavior in response to an action. Rather than accept this uncomfortable idea as a valid point (which it is), the debater defending consequentialism refused to address this criticism. Perhaps it was just debate tactic and he was counting on avoiding the criticism being a better strategy than acknowledging it. But the whole exchange did result in me concluding that the debater defending consequentialism really didn’t think his position through very well. His credibility was lost with me due to his failure to acknowledge an idea that was clearly uncomfortable to him.
Expose Dangerous Thinking
The world is full of some really dangerous people with even more dangerous ideas. When we put restrictions on the expression of ideas, we make it more difficult to identify potentially dangerous people and their dangerous ideas. While it might be more comfortable avoiding these people and their ideas, and pretending they don’t exist, the better strategy is confronting them and doing our best to explain why we think their ideas are dangerous. Isolation breeds extremism; integration promotes moderation.
The casual use of deliberately insulting labels such “racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobe,” and “xenophobe” might feel satisfying and might even be perfectly justifiable, but rarely causes the accused to change their way of thinking. Instead, it lets people with dangerous ideas know that their ideas are socially unacceptable, which is not the same as being wrong or dangerous. We need to encourage the free exchange of ideas, not banish those with dangerous ideas into exile where their ideas fester and eventually are expressed as behaviors and possibly even devastating actions.
Attempting to Solve the Wrong Problem
If you’re convinced that the United States has a problem with racist cops, then you would focus on the problem of racism—no doubt a worthy social issue. But what if you consider the less socially acceptable ideas that the United States has a problem with police brutality and use of excessive force? Entertaining this idea might lead you to facts and data that justify that conclusion (such as the percentage of white suspects who are also unjustly shot), which would turn your attention to what might be the larger problem. Racism might have an effect on the number of black suspects being unjustly gunned down by cops, but excessive force used by police and the laws that protect such force might have a much greater effect on the number of all suspects, regardless of skin color, being unjustly gunned down by cops. If we don’t entertain the alternative ideas, even if they go against our ideology, personal experience, or anecdotal evidence, we can be wasting our time on solving the wrong problem.
Uncomfortable Idea: The police in the United States have a much greater problem with excessive force than racism.
Here is a fact. The U.S. locks people up at a higher rate than any other country.1 Clearly, the United States has a problem with crime. Or does it? What if we took a closer look at the laws, policies, and social norms and questioned them? Should we be locking people up for using recreational drugs? Should we be locking people up for selling and buying sex? Should an 18-year-old girl serve jail time for having sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend? The United States has many laws that are based on outdated ideology, iron-age morality, and incorrect assumptions. Unless we deal with the uncomfortable idea that our concepts of morality and justice might be way off, we will continue to create more crime by making more things illegal. In other words, our outrageous incarceration rate in the “land of the free” is a symptom of the the real problem. The problem, however, is not an excessive number of evil people hurting other people; it is locking people up who don’t live up to our moral standards.
Uncomfortable Idea: We are locking too many people up because of our rigid understanding of morality and justice.
Treating Symptoms and Not the Disease
When we have a cold we eat chicken soup, take extra vitamin C, and have our chakras realigned while placing healing crystals in our navel. This is all fine and dandy if it makes us feel better, but it does nothing to make the cold go away. When it comes to the common cold, the best we can do with our current medical knowledge is treat the symptoms but not the disease. If we could treat the disease, this would clearly be the preferable option that would prevent a lot of future suffering. When it comes to social issues, our desire to avoid uncomfortable ideas can cause us to focus on the symptoms while ignoring the disease.
Why is saying “people of color” appropriate but saying “colored people” is offensive to most people in 2016? Is it the word “of” that has some special power to diffuse racism? Does putting the adjective before the noun make it offensive? The reasons why terms become offensive and sometimes become acceptable after being deemed offensive are mostly due to association and negative connotations. There are terms used to label every race, class, nationality, sexual preference, gender identity, physical and mental difference, and what’s acceptable is constantly changing. While we are all so concerned about terminology, the underlying problems of prejudice and discrimination continue. The negative connotations that become associated with the labels are just a symptom of the prejudice and discrimination.
Uncomfortable Idea: No matter how many times marginalized groups change their preferred label, they will still be marginalized unless the real difficult underlying problems are addressed.
In our age of political correctness, we might be infuriated by the expression of any negative stereotype, but some stereotypes are supported by data. If we dismiss the stereotype as a form of prejudice and focus on suppressing the stereotype, the underlying problem that gave rise to the justified stereotype and associated prejudice will continue. Consider that black, adult,