Mea sententia

When people feel threatened, they are less likely to use careful, fact-based, rational thought and decision-making processes and tend to depend more on intuition, gut feelings, and 'vibes' to assess the situation and decide what to do. When one senses danger, prompt and immediate action is called for. This preference under threat for what Kahnemann and Tversky termed System 1 thinking over System 2 thinking has a good evolutionary survival benefit: when an unknown large animal with big teeth and claws suddenly appears, that is a lousy time to sit and think.

Each of us finds our own personal truth about what the world is like and how it works. All of us then tend to confuse our experience of reality with reality itself. (Sometimes referenced as the map versus the territory.) The narratives we create about our world and then operate from are good enough to have allowed our species to survive, but we all believe things that are comfortable and useful but not true. Extreme versions of this are the outlandish conspiracy theories: flat earth, 9/11 conspiracy, Covid vaccie makes peole magnetic.

Here is my comment (edited for clarity and to avoid identifying individuals) on a social media platform in response to a post attacking a candidate who supports every woman's right to reproductive freedom. I don't often participate in social media arguments on topics like this as I find it rarely useful. However, this particular post was so replete with inaccuracies, and written with language designed to generate outrage rather than share information or offer a perspective, that I felt obliged to speak up.

I recently received a newsletter from a Maine elected official posing this question: “What keeps you up at night?”  I understood the question to be asking what Maine issues are most important to me, but knew immediately that what keeps me up at night are not local issues but the over-arching state of United States politics and the alarming possibility that our pluralistic democracy in the US will  be replaced by some form of authoritarian or fascist theocracy.

After I posted a comment in an online conversation I was told by someone I know well in real life: “That doesn’t sound like the Peter Elias I’ve worked and played with over the years.”  My response was the simple observation that most of us automatically use different ‘voices’ in different settings: we don’t use the same vocabulary or phrasing when addressing a work colleague, a grandparent, a state trooper, or a skiing buddy. Code switching is a current term for this.

I want to offer an alternative to: "my opinion is right and opposing opinions are wrong."

It’s both possible and important to have good quality conversations with people with whom we disagree. There are some simple (but not easy) principles to keep in mind:

• Be sure your goal is to connect and understand - and not to change minds.  Listen to learn, not to prepare a rebuttal. People understand and use words and phrases in very different ways. Don't assume you understand what the other person means: "I want to be sure we are both talking about the same thing. Could you help me understand what you mean when you say 'X'?"