Sixth Day Six: Everyone Needs To Chill Out
We need to build trust - and that starts with not assuming the worst of everyone around us.
It’s been a bit since I’ve blogged. Well, I did write one thing earlier this week that was more of a personal journal entry than anything. Before that, there hasn’t been any new activity on my blog since July.
While I have several two-thirds written posts floating around that likely won’t see the light of day until the New Year, I did feel like bringing back my Sixth Day Six weekly round-up of things I’ve read that I found interesting. When I say interesting, that means trying to find a wider net of perspectives.
Which is the overall theme of this week’s round-up. The last couple of years I’ve witnessed a decay in people engaging with those different than them, assuming the worst and gradually slipping to a more uncivil posture. I think all of this begins with a decay in trust.
I’ll have more thoughts on trust in one of those partially-written posts later in the year. For now, here are a few thoughts from those better at communicating than myself.
Hanlon’s Razor: Relax, Not Everything is Out to Get You
Healthy skepticism is a good thing - blissful ignorance is rarely helpful. However, I truly believe a default posture of distrust is void of courage. There are bad actors out there but most people are trying to do the best they can with what they have. This article talks about the concept of “Hanlon’s Razor” and why we shouldn’t assume the worst intentions by others. This quote in the article from Douglas Hubbard best explains how the principle of Hanlon’s Razor might apply to today.
“I would add a clumsier but more accurate corollary to this: ‘Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system of interactions.’ People behaving with no central coordination and acting in their own best interest can still create results that appear to some to be clear proof of conspiracy or a plague of ignorance.”
Click to read the full article
The End of Trust
Yes, we are a capitalistic economy. But capitalism is useless without trust. This article from The Atlantic talks about how the rapid decrease of trust within our society is likely to have real negative consequences in our economic activity. While trust is hard to quantify, a few economists mentioned in the article gave it a pretty good shot.
The economists Paul Zak and Stephen Knack found, in a study published in 1998, that a 15 percent bump in a nation’s belief that “most people can be trusted” adds a full percentage point to economic growth each year. That means that if, for the past 20 years, Americans had trusted one another like Ukrainians did, our annual GDP per capita would be $11,000 lower; if we had trusted like New Zealanders did, it’d be $16,000 higher. “If trust is sufficiently low,” they wrote, “economic growth is unachievable.”
Click to read the full article
Everything Popular is Problematic
David Heinemeir Hansson, a founder of Basecamp that I have both praise and criticism for, recently wrote some good thoughts on how we can’t even have open debate anymore. While I really feel he is a little too high on Joe Rogan (pun unintended) in this article, his basic point is one worth considering.
Such basic curiosity of trying to really understand what someone else might actually think or believe is in low supply these days. On many of the most controversial issues, even partaking in a conversation with "the other side" is often derided as "platforming". Under the proposition that if we let the wrong people present their bad ideas, they might convince some of the.. right people? That strikes me as a profoundly insecure and pessimistic conception of the listener.
Click to read the full article
What Civility Really Means
This is a really neat story of two people who, online were enemies, but ended up becoming friends through helping each other during the pandemic. These are two individuals who are far apart from each other on an ideological spectrum from each other but grew to genuinely enjoy each other as people, without either side compromising their core beliefs. It’s a picture of what a healthy pluralistic society should look like.
A lack of love is our real problem, for which the lack of civility is just a symptom. We know how to love; we simply withhold it from those we deem unlovable. Mysteriously, in 2021, those people all seem to belong to the other political party.
Stop aiming for the low bar of civility, which you can’t sink your teeth into like a chimichanga. Instead, aim for love, even of your political enemies. You might even realize they aren’t your enemies after all.
Click to read the full article
Hate The Sin, Love The Sinner
I don’t really like the title of the post because I don’t feel like it really captures the spirit of the point the author tries to make. The title makes one assume that one partly is clearly in the wrong and the other is right. Ryan Holiday really presents a broader message of tolerance from a Stoicism perspective: how you should be strict with yourself but tolerant of others.
We can accept that people can see things in a different way and let them live as they wish (again, so long as those choices aren’t hurting other people). We can, to borrow an old expression, hate the sin while still loving the sinner. Because what they do, how they act is not up to us. The good we choose to still see in them? That’s in our control.
Click here to read the full article
Heineken: Open Your World
This is an older video. The publication date on this particular video says 2017 on YouTube but I think it may even pre-date that. While this wasn’t something I ran across recently, I thought it blended well with the overall themes from the authors mentioned above. It’s four minutes well spent.
Click here to view the full video if reading on email
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