The Echo World of Opinion
Don't mistake the latest opinion for the newest idea---or even for ideas.
Opinions are a cut-rate method to furnish the mind. They are freer than ever. In fact they have all but set up residence in our heads and banished thinking.
Seriously, we don’t seem to recognize the danger. Opinions are the modern fig leaf. On social media you can’t be without one. Our Sunday Best.
Thoughts have antecedents and qualifications and evidence. They are a living sequence of ideas. They explore the world. They create a new world.
How far 21st century Americans have wandered into the symbolic world of shouts and echoes! All “opine.” All can lose coherence and not take a single drink.
We preach sacred opinions at Church. We teach patriotic opinions in schools. We exchange motivating opinions at conferences. All will be well, we say, if learning is by rote. Think less; repeat more.
You can be respected, privileged, and well protected if you repeat the right opinions. And you don’t have to look far to find the one’s that are “right.” They are what others are saying, especially the “cool” kids, all entitled adults.
Again seriously, this is one of our most critical problems. As long as we insist on correct speech, we will be silencing spontaneity, the opening to original ideas and their signature emotion, amazement.
Stop to think before you speak, means “chose the right opinion for the script of this conversation.” We build walls of polite conversation to guard the challenges of change. To the extent that many of us are “doing ok,” we are reassured by such a “commonplace.”
Opinions are the guard rails of established paths. We see no danger; we hear no danger; we find no danger.
Emerson said, “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I’m not sure I would say hobgoblin, but I might explore that possibility in another blog. What I would suggest for consideration is what follows in his essay:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
The right opinions will not ever be misunderstood. Not only because they offer little to understand, but because the best of them repeat the most common of what is already understood.