Is my opponent truly stupid?

Lately on social media and other sharing groups we are seeing a vast array of hate speech. Yes it is sometimes cloaked in “polite” terms but hate is the point. Now to be honest I expect many of these posts are intended to “wake” up those who read these posts. We all know this never works. But we try anyway.

The idea is to present our perspective in a hope that they will see where they have misunderstood the “real” situation. The problem is, as we all know, that perspective is a self created reality. Perspective is derived from what we see, and then what we translate from what we saw. The focus is continually “I”. Then when we add preconceived ideas into our vision we reinforce that opinion onto what we see or in this case read.

So how do we stop this continued plethora of hate speech? One idea I have is to stop assuming that everyone who disagrees with us is ignorant or just plain stupid. The facts are that in most cases there are people on both sides of the argument who have rather high IQ’s. We might not agree that they are using their brains but I doubt that our assumption is true.

Personal perspectives have the result of blinding us to the facts that disagree with our position. Then when we hold the belief that anyone who disagrees with us is less than able to grasp the “true” facts we further dig our hole of self deception.

If you are into hate speech, have a blast. For the rest of us may we learn to hear and perhaps see a piece of their perspective and permit our own to grow.

Blessings