Let 2023 be the year of Depolarised Living.

Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong, Vox, Brian Resnick, Jan 4, 2019

"There is a good warning indicator of when two people might be falling prey to the dynamics of polarization we’ve been talking about. Suppose you and a friend agree on lots of things. On all of those, she seems as perfectly rational as you do. She handles the evidence well, she is alive to subtleties of argument, a smart cookie. Not much gets past her. I’ll bet she thinks much the same of you. But her position on issue X just seems radically wrong, stupid, even. How can she possibly think that? That’s the warning indicator. It is hard to believe that someone so rational in other areas could be so irrational in area X. That’s a sign that it’s time to layout evidence and argument on both sides, re-calibrate and re-evaluate. There’s no guarantee that like-mindedness will result, but strong disagreement in a small area with a person you think is generally rational is an indicator that you may be playing Mr. Magoo to their Dr. Seuss.

How do we fix polarization? How do we try to have a rational discussion in a context that is already polarized?"

Extract from section Rational Discussion in a Polarized Context , The Philosopher’s Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room, Professor Patrick Grim, 2013

1. Know you could be wrong. Why? Every idea-belief you hold as Truth is human fabricated paradigm, and the more intensely your belief in the infallibility of your paradigm the less likely you are to admit an anomaly exists, the greater the potential affective(emotional) reaction-which gets your idea where?

2. The manner in which an argument is presented, abusive, derogatory, loud potentially determines if your message will make it through an implicit heuristic non-reflective reaction.

3. Although the manner in which an argument is presented, abusive, derogatory, loud and particularly antithesis to your own beliefs, fight the urge for a heuristic one-word one-sentence response. There is generally an insight able to be gleaned even regards the relative emotional content which every message contains.

4. Your grasp of any subject is limited, you can never be aware of all the evidence which determines your belief true or false, no matter how many experts you are standing on. It has been found the greater the perceived expertise the less likely you are to see a truth which undermines your paradigm or at least qualifies it.

5. Source of information as we know tends to provide relative strength, but also as we know experts under paradigms on many occasions and sometimes almost all the experts in the field fail to accept anomalies even anomalies determining their paradigm false.

6. Simply saying it is so is not enough, you need to provide cogent evidence yourself, no use pointing to twenty thousand experts(1,4,5), given this is important to you, and communication with others is important as we cannot achieve change without other-provide the evidence which fits with your audience.

7. Ditch dualism, populists, green, left-wing, right-wing, proletariat,... you are communicating with a person who has possibly significantly differing views, it is their belief-behavior you seek to influence. We have to realise each of us from certain perspectives may reside in any number of the above at the same time. Stick to the argument the manner and the nature of your evidence.

8. There are limits, know that no matter how strong your evidence is humans have not evolved to be rational, we are set up from childhood to have certain biases which are nigh impossible to change, same with the paradigms we live by and within, do not expect conversion, all you can hope is, the anomalies you have provided regards someone else's paradigm may add up from other sources to enable change.

9. Your beliefs-paradigms are as valid as anyone else's, by valid I mean rational to you, and rational to them, it does not mean either present no threat to fellow humans.

10. Although some rationale systems have violence as a justified, authorised method of resolving conflict, such calls must always be forcefully rejected.

11. Develop a personal framework for arguing your case with others, I suggest the following link may be helpful.https://thoughtcatalog.com/brandon-gorrell/2011/03/how-to-have-a-rational-discussion/

12. So you live in human fallible paradigms, you hold beliefs that are important to you, engage as best you can, for each persons view adds to a merged consensus, for good or bad, whether you agree or not with the outcome, you will know you contributed. 

Being an uninformed citizen, silent or forcing citizens to be silent via deviance paradigms, loud, abusive demeaning attacks, in my opinion, are inherently dangerous for a Democracy, for in time, in my view, this creates a negative emotional force which may manifest itself in an abrupt polarising manner. When a significant majority of a nation cannot voice their beliefs to have them challenged or supported in the public domain, regarded as deviants, dangerous polarisation may occur with violence-fear rather than words-evidence becoming the decider. Even Democracy itself designed to avoid conflict by having issues argued in the public domain, is seen as failing and needing replacement as one side or both become so polarised, start to believe rational evidence based argument will not convince Other of Truth and gradually develop an increasing force to have Other submit.

May help reflecting on Lincolns view regards contributing to social/political discussions.

“It was one of Lincoln’s ways of working out his chief value to the country, and that value was his clear sense from the start it was our democratic scheme that was at stake, and that if it was to be saved, every citizen who could aid must help to give all that was in them.

Lincoln seems to have put it something like this to himself. Everybody in the country has had a part in bringing this thing about; everybody feels they have a right to say how things shall be handled; everybody that is worth their salt is going to exercise that right, and they are going to do it according to the kind of person they are – according to their temperament, their training, their self-control, their meanness, and their goodness. If we are going to put this thing through and prove that citizens can govern themselves, we must get from them what they can give, and we must let them give it in their own way.” Source: The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Tarbell, 1917

The golden rule for every citizen in a true Democracy:

"..it is probable I have been more presuming than becomes me. However, upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them." Lincoln

"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." - Thomas Jefferson to William Hamilton, April 22, 1800

As much as possible in a Democracy, we must stick with both Lincolns and Jefferson's views for even if we have to force change, beliefs, policy onto fellow citizens, we have to be prepared to articulate an evidence-based argument, as well as be prepared to face inconvenient truths about our own position.