One criticism we often receive is that our work is biased. I have a shameful admission
to make — yes we are. And by we- I mean all of us. We all are, in one sense or another.
But nobody wants to think of themselves or their chosen pundit in this light. "No,"
they object, "only those gullible Fox/CNN drones are beholden to that vice." In some
way, they think that they are excluded from this state of being.
Though uncomfortable to realize, the fact of the matter is that we're all biased.
The problem only rears its head when we refuse to confront it. Ignorance of one's bias
only allows it to fester and metastasize, which leads you into becoming deeply embedded
in an ideology without the slightest clue, thinking all the while that you're just
an impartial witness to reality. Some mistakenly construe this fact to mean
that because we're all biased, that truth itself is a relative experience. This, too,
is WRONG. There remains a baseline of facts that we all strive to orient ourselves toward.
Through crowdsourcing the different perspectives on these facts, we hope to arrive at what
you might call an ultimate truth. The conclusions we draw and the direction
we head in as a society aren't always obvious. This is why we have varying perspectives,
to make sense of the array of information before us. Our different and distinct personality
traits guide our behavior in every feature of life. Why would political preference be
any different? Has it ever aroused your curiosity that you and those who agree with you are
consistently right? What are the odds of any one person being so right so often?
Zero. The sooner this much is understood, the less eager we'll be to leap for the
worst possible motivation on the part of those we disagree with. To the person unknowingly
drowning in bias, their view of the world is so self-evidently right that surely only
someone with bad intentions would deny it. This is the chasm we find ourselves in today — as
we are more polarized than any other time since the Civil War.
At the heart of this divide lies a deep misunderstanding as to how we arrive at the conclusions we
do and why. None of this should be surprising. Politics, fundamentally, is about values.
Our temperaments guide us toward what we value most. Using the Big Five Personality Metric,
Conservatives tend to be high in trait conscientiousness, which is associated with orderliness (think
big, beautiful walls), high in industriousness, and low in openness. Liberals are the inverse
of this: low in conscientiousness and high in openness. Disgust sensitivity is the most
potent predictor of conservatism. Libertarians rank the lowest in disgust sensitivity. Though
there is much more to be said of the differences in personality and how they inform our political
beliefs, all of this is to demonstrate that they don't stand independent of who we are
and what we believe. In our present time of peaceful prosperity,
there is no existential threat to bind the entire nation together. For example, when
soldiers are faced with an imminent threat, it is considerably easier to maintain order.
Once settled down, with no obvious shared goal to strive toward, the fault lines begin
to fracture. Our individual priorities diverge because the path laid before us isn't nearly
as clear. Therefore, we turn in on one another. With personality being extraordinarily instructive
to our political beliefs, it's only a natural consequence that ideological bubbles would
take form. People overwhelmingly forge friendships with those of similar personality characteristics,
socioeconomic status, etc. As a consequence of this endless clustering,
we are left with two sides of people striving to impose their temperamental worldview on
the political environment, laboring under the belief that their solution is the only
one that rests on a factual foundation. And in some instances it is. But what must be
understood is that no one way of approaching an issue will lead you to the right answer
100% of the time. This is often foolishly taken to mean that
your innate "bias" prevents you from arriving at an objective truth. It doesn't necessarily,
but it can if you're oblivious to the fact that you are under its spell.
Much of this explains why attacking a person's political position is so often taken as a
personal assault; in a sense, their politics are a part of their identity. This much can
be seen when social justice advocates take any criticism as an attack on their very existence.
Why is this? It makes perfect sense if you consider that you are, in essence, challenging
the very lens through which they perceive reality. This is the problem with reflexively
denying that you're biased as opposed to reckoning with it. This is why the issue of
bias in politics is so deceptive. The reality is that the political landscape is constantly
changing, and if we have any hope of adapting to a continually changing set of circumstances,
it is essential that we communicate those differences through dialogue.
Bias isn't the problem. The problem lies in bullheadedly clinging to the belief that
you are in some way immune to this innate feature of the human experience. You don't
have free will; you are a mindless thought toilet that regurgitates whatever its biology
tells it to. Learn it, live it, love it.
For more infomation >> I LOVE COLLEEN & RACHEL BALLINGER! - Duration: 7:17. 
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