Leaping to the wrong conclusion should be an Olympic sport

I've met some prize athletes, let me tell you.

Over the last week, I've been chatting online with someone about some faith based topics covering everything from dreams, depression, the nature of reality, the usefulness of meditation, affirmations, and all sorts of stuff.

Not in any real deep way, of course. There's a limit to what you can get through in the written word. But something that cropped up over and over was how this other person was pre-emptively pre-judging me, my thoughts, and my responses.

You have to understand, that I get that sort of thing a LOT. So you know, I make allowances for it. But when someone makes the same misjudgement repeatedly, well, that kind of gets my goat.

Everyone seems to think they are a great judge of character. And a lot of people just plain suck at it. I'm no exception. So often people are quick to jump to erroneous conclusions. It's just that lately it's been happening so much with me, that I've been forced to notice it more.

The most common feature is pidgeon-holing. That's where a reader takes a statement I've made, works out what group of people most commonly say that type of thing, assume I'm with "them" and attack or respond accordingly. This has the often-noted side-effect of placing words in my mouth which I didn't say in the first place, but which are often attributed to the extremist elements of whatever group I've been pidgeon-holed into.

In the words of Marwood, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." I think in times ahead, we're going to get to the point where we can't be blindly loyal to any single group, party, country or viewpoint. We won't be able to afford to pidgeon-hole those who say things we don't agree with. Just because someone is in the wrong party, the wrong country, or his skin is a different color, or he prays to a different god, doesn't automatically make him wrong. We need to watch the pidgeon-holing thing. Make sure it doesn't get out of hand. Try to understand exactly who we're talking to, not who we assume we know who we're talking to. Try to understand what they're saying, not assume we know what they are trying to say.


posted by Manchild at 11:18 PM