Extremism

Considering the revisionist tendencies of conquerors, how will historical truth ever surface? It's amazing that we have any racial memory at all. FrontPageMag.com talks about how the Pilgrims got themselves mostly to thank for their bountiful harvest in their version of Thanksgiving history. Of course, expect the left to vehemently react in the comments section with their own narrowly biased version. According to popular politics, there's always a good guy and a bad guy, never the twain shall meet in a single person.

All this makes the quest for absolute truth all the more complicated and seemingly impossible. All this highlights the contingency of every perspective and thought on previous experiences and concepts. I would like to say, "Distrust either side of a debate when the sides are extreme and unrelenting," but what about cases where a pretty well substantiated position is attacked by a lone contrarian? Does the existence of controversy have to completely erase the validity of a position?

The Middle Way is threatened by extremists who stand to skew the middle by their sheer extremism. It's like how the mean income of a bar with Bill Gates in it is in the billions, even if the rest of patrons are trailer trash. It's not enough to average out the extreme biases to form a moderate opinion, yet that's how our politics seem to work. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Since the opposing side knows this, it squeaks its own wheels even louder, resulting in a cacophony of diatribes expressing more anger and less content.

I believe the first step in reestablishing a functional democracy is to cut down the anger. Emotions are okay, but not to the point where they turn the debate into an elementary school brawl. Next, we need to allow ourselves to make mistakes and learn from them. Unfortunately, these two steps are harder than coming to a stance in the first place.