When someone sees all opinions as equal — i.e., any person has a right hold any opinion — all discussion is circular. People who are trapped in that false construction of reality feel personally threatened by conflicting opinions. But they are lucky in one way: they have it pretty easy in the research department.
When a person sees opinions as derived from weighing the facts, the conflicting opinion is not a personal threat, but it does present you with a lot of work. First you have to see what facts the other person uses to justify their opinion, then you have to see how those facts fit into the larger context of your opinion and your known facts, and then you have some fact checking and connecting of the dots to do before you:
- change your mind and agree with the other person,
- continue in disagreement with facts to sustain you,
- or arrive at a third opinion that incorporates all of the facts.
Sometimes the gathering of facts becomes so involved that you can’t remember the original conflicting opinion, but you have the benefit of the study even if you can’t remember what the object was. (Hint: Wikipedia is cool, but set a timer.)
Once you start gathering, verifying, and associating facts, you discover how seldom you have all of them. Some are hidden for later discovery — often in hopes they will never be found — and new ones keep popping up. Example: I might spend money today at Sam’s Club. That will invalidate several facts in Sam’s inventory, in my bank account, and — if I trip over the curb and break my leg — in whether or not I can drive a car. So if someone verified any of those facts yesterday, their facts would be outdated.
Sometimes people pick their fact set to persuade you to believe something contrary to the truth, maybe in order to move money from your bank account to theirs. So you have to see who is using what facts to promote what opinions and what they are leaving out, and there you have another whole set of dots to connect.
Keeping conflicting opinions in the factual universe and connecting the dots is worth the effort. You can learn new things, modify an opinion without bloodshed, and break out of the circular discussion. Frequently you can even keep your friends, since you don’t have to kill them, silence them, or shame them.
Probably the greatest advantage of forming your opinions in the fact-based universe is that the fabric of that universe is not easily ripped by shouting heads. You can study the deficit, tax breaks for big oil, tax breaks for millionaires, or any other issue in the opinion mill, without feeling like it is a deadly tumor in your own personal cranium. Nobody is expected to be rational about a deadly tumor in their own personal cranium, but the number of people who are irrational about public policy issues today is — well, irrational.
Life in the Third Layer 