Have you ever noticed how people tend to think that they are right and others wrong? If they encounter or engage with a person from the opposite side they tend to see them as “ignorant,” Neanderthal, antiquated, in the Dark Ages, stupid, not intellectual, backwards, a little slow, ill-informed, bull-headed, unenlightened, etc. The list could be infinite. Very frequently there is so much anger in the person condemning that it is almost embarrassing. You can see this happening with sports fans as they battle it out. We tend to be kind to such fanaticism so we chuckle and give the fans a pass. In other areas it is not so pretty.
In my former life as a graduate student, I had a very crude and somewhat shocking encounter with the world of opposites. At the time, a professor I knew gave me the name of the head of a psychology school that trained future clinicians. This person was known as a contributor to a field I was looking into. I made contact and shared my interests and angles of doctoral research. Hoping to receive a warm and mentor-like response, I was swiftly trashed, attacked, called names, and then challenged to have my views shown they were irrelevant.
To say the least, I was shocked to get such treatment from someone who claimed was training future “healers.” I thought a long time and responded with a kind word pointing out that we all need to seek truth and realize we know little. I often think about that person and hope they were able to move on into a kinder way of treating others.
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Thank you for this article. I am in a situation were I am stwying with someone like this. it os very hard and sometimes I do have to stwnd up for myself. I know I should just shut up and take it but I am losing myself in the process. It does not matter what I say anyway they think that they are right even when they know there lying. You could catch them in a lie and they will defend themselves to the extreme. So why bother, well they back off just a little for ahile not a long while but you get a break. I feel like saying guess what your fake you do not know what is real if it hit you in the face. It is sad but what is even sadder are their victims because people like these will not change ever. its not them they do not listen except to themselves they have an image whatever that image is to them to perserve. I just cannot wait to get out of dodge. Blah Blah Blah is all I hear now nod my head yep um huh your wonderful oh god help us.
No doubt,Simon Lopez De Victoria’s piece, “Avoiding the Traps of Extremism” does justice to his endeavour of making us question our typical intellectual arrogance and its resultant uncompromising stands on a multitude of subjects. Yet I find it in good taste to indulge those who are prone to exhibit such arrogance in as far as they don’t combine it with antisocial practises which insult the right of dissenting discussants to freely exercise their own rights of positions. I have my reason for taking this stand; and it is built simply on the knowledge that the road of excess often leads to the palace of wisdom! As in De Victoria’s piece of the discussants from his alma mater, we see that a resolution was always reached and passed after a hot debate over which there was a constant moderator! This is the prototype out of which the idea of sholarship was emerged in the first place. Whether you are looking at ancient Greece and Plato’s Academie or you are looking at Aristotle’s peripatetics, the practice is the same. Our modern states organised such political tiers of government like the parliament and national assemblies on very much the same principle. The result is here for all of us to see. Our generation remains the best developed since the beginning of time. There is no gainsaying the fact that our educational systems have, on the whole, yielded ultra-modern societies with its futurist technologies such as the one permitting me to now respond to De Victoria’s position. To continue to develop and maintain such societies as we have become proud inheritors of, we must not only encourage those fierce passions with which many discussants oppose and stand for a given proposition but also preserve and protect those instruments and system by which a continuity of that tradition is assured if we want to leave a legacy posterity will praise us for.Toyin Abiodun is a writer and a doctoral candidate of Department of Theatre Arts. University of Ibadan, Nigeria