Everyone lives a different life from everyone else. Everyone learns different lessons different ways, and interprets those lessons through a filter that is partly formed of genetic hard-wiring and environmental programming.
Therefore, everyone looks at things and thinks of things differently…sees them in a slightly different way. They literally live in their own world of sensory input and interpretive process.
This is the basis for “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” and “everyone’s viewpoint is equally valid”. And these statements are true…to a point. The point they stop being true is when a person’s opinion or viewpoint or model of the world is demonstrably not working.
Does it pass the reality test? Can that person apply their model of the world to their problems and come out with a favorable result? If not, does their model of the world have rules for how it can be changed to accommodate new information and the need to practically apply it to the world and get favorable results?
There are people for whom that answer is simply…”no”. And yet, they persist in forging ahead with their blinders firmly attached, and a chip on their shoulder that the whole world is so damned unreasonable. If you point out to them the things they think and do that are the root of their difficulties, they will snarl about you being “intolerant”, and “ignorant” or “being elitist” or whatever. They may even form a cultural glory around stories of persecution and subjugation they suffer on behalf of their ideas…setting themselves up as martyrs for a lost but true and noble cause.
No, dude, your doing stuff that just simply doesn’t work. And you keep doing it and expect a different result. That’s crazy. It’s not elitist to learn from your mistakes.
One way to test if you suffer from this problem is to look and see if your life repeats the same unpleasant patterns over and over again. Is there a theme to the stuff that happens to you? Do you find yourself consistently thinking that the whole world has to change in order for you to exist in it harmoniously? There might be a hint there.
Let’s take fundamentalists for an example. I like the Christian kind myself, but any fundamentalist will do.
The persistent theme of fundamentalism is that there was a time when everything was “right”. Where human nature and God’s nature were in accord, where everyone lived according to the same proscribed set of rules and standards, and deviation from them just didn’t happen.
Everything was perfect back then, and if we could just hit the reset button everything will be perfect again.
On the other side of the coin, we’ve got Utopians. Some of these people like to pretend they are progressives, but the problem with that is that they also have a vision of perfection. It is a perfection that has never existed, but could…if we could just change people to be more evolved and civilized. Like if we could stop them using certain words, and if we could make bad ideas go away by re-writing all the books, and if we could just get enough rabid foot soldiers to make snarkey comments, hound people into signing petitions and enforcing boycotts and wear sloganed buttons/tee-shirts to provide the peer pressure to conform...CONFORM DAMN YOU! We could make everything perfect.
Whichever flavor of unrealist you are dealing with, the hallmark is their disconnection from reality. They start arguing with the facts…and when they can, they create think-tanks and propaganda machines to make up and disseminate their own conflicting facts. And wherever possible, they make intelligent conversation almost impossible through obfuscation of the facts, co-opting the opposition’s rhetoric, and through a bombastic hulk-smash sort of social assault that makes anyone who attempts civility an automatic loser. They also have to take issue with an ever-widening array of mainstream assumptions and accepted findings...until there comes a point beyond which most people just cannot follow.
There’s a variety of flavors of unrealists, and I myself hold some pet ideas and beliefs that very likely will bump up against reality from time to time. I’m OK with that. I can change them when they become a demonstrable problem, but until then, I’ll let myself hang on to them. They make me happy…and I’m OK with people who hold wacky ideas and notions. I’m OK with people whose wacky ideas and notions cause them problems, but they don’t want to let go of them. That’s their prerogative. If the benefits outweigh the cost…hey that’s a personal decision they have a right to make for themselves.
Where I run into trouble is when other people’s wacky ideas and notions cause me problems, when they start re-writing language, literature, history, contorting science…or just plain yelling the same ridiculous crap over and over hoping it will make it true.
In particular, I find it interesting that if you argue with these people, they will cry “foul” in the form of elitism, intolerance, and they will make accusations of ignorance when they themselves subscribe to a worldview that necessitates the conformity of the majority of the world’s population to their very narrow worldview in order to work, which requires people to accept “facts” and reasoning that is in conflict with the most widely accepted knowledge on a variety of topics, and requires people to accept a smaller, fringier, less well developed body of work as disproving a more complete body of work. (for example; Intelligent Design vs. Natural Selection, or the idea that sanitation bears more credit for reductions in polio infections than mass inoculations).
Some models of the world work better than others. Some are more complete than others. Some of them are more compatible with a larger variety of people. New models or alternative models must sell themselves in the marketplace of ideas. They have to be able to stand up to hard use, resistance and challenge. This is not elitist, but simply realistic.
I'm OK with the view that in life there are no “right“ or “wrong“ answers...but I do believe there are effective and ineffective answers. And I'm comfortable with calling them as I see them.