View the world through your own lens, not one pre-crafted for you by talk radio or your friends or society
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
I was just thinking this recently. I think PG was prompted to write this quick essay due to a recent poll on Hacker News regarding whether people were theists, deists or atheists. I think it was 3 to 1 atheists to theists.
When I was a teenager, I liked to watch documentaries about the New Left of the 60's. I considered myself liberal by all accounts. These days, I feel less like ascribing to a single worldview than ever before. It doesn't make sense to call yourself a liberal when all it means is rubber-stamping ideas on a panoply of vaguely related issues in current times.
Of course these days the proper word for liberal is progressive. But I'm not a progressive, nor am I conservative. I'm just me, and I'd like to think I can try to read and understand any given issue and not be clouded by a particular lens. PG is right. Labels are dumb. Think for yourself.
I'm not saying I don't see the world through a particular lens. But it's a fool who always uses a lens pre-crafted for them by talk radio (of either wing) or what it means to be conservative or liberal or theist or atheist. At least try to craft your own. Somehow, I think we'll be all better off.
4 comments
I'm actually reading through hackers and painters right now and another PG-ism holds really true in this specific case--if you have dangerous thoughts, hold them to yourself. I think that fits in well here. In order to function in society we have to be part of groups and fit social norms. But in order to preserve our humanity, we need to hold dangerous ideas and act upon them, even if the only safe recourse is to act upon them independently.
Broad frames of reference are sometimes useful when we express ideas. And labels are one way of providing these.
It's important to understand that there is a great deal of heterogeneity under each label and to interpret them only as coarse indicators of what someone's world view might be.
For example, some die-hard GOP supporters will condemn anyone that doesn't agree with them as being Communist or Socialist. The opposite happens with some radical lefties too.
Labels, can therefore have the danger of putting everyone outside of your own group into the same pot, into which you just piss negativity.
Everyone is an individual. I refuse to follow the crowd myself over any issue.
If I'd chosen politics, I couldn't be anything other than an Independent myself, as I would refuse to toe a party line on things I felt strongly at odds with. My belief in what I felt was the correct thing to do, would always prevail.
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