We are taught that there is a right and a wrong way to do… anything. Our ability to choose the right answer is constantly tested by our parents, teachers, or spouses. The regular interrogation of “am I correct?” (and the underlying “am I smart enough?”) reinforces a view that for a given situation, there is only 1 right answer that needs to be found.
We grow into adults who think “I’m right, and if others disagree with me, they must be wrong”. Which leads to “If there can only be one right answer, and I want to make sure I’m right, then I must prove that person wrong”. We end up in a dangerous, pressure filled container with a growing tension to defend our positions.
We have been programmed by society to work very hard to prove our right-ness. This serves us well when it comes to building bridges and safeguarding our money. This does not always work well when it comes to interpersonal relationships.
Fact: a thing that is known or proved to be true.
So what happens to opinions? The lines get blurred (erased!) and we spend our energy fighting the same supposedly good fight over whether our opinions are right or wrong… despite that they are not supposed to be! *
The internet is great at showcasing this phenomena. You don’t have to look too far in Facebook to find people insulting each other over their wrong-ness of opinion.
How can these IMDB reviewers see the world so differently? This is the beauty of opinions. No-one here is right or wrong*. They are all right for themselves.
The trap we fall into is that we believe a movie by itself can only be one thing: good or bad. We forget that movies by themselves are not good or bad… they are just canisters of film (ok very large files on a computer). It takes another human being paired with that movie to come up with a conclusion about it’s awesomeness. This means there are 7 billion possibilities for interpreting that movie.
Movies are safe for disagreement. Where this gets difficult is when we turn to the politics that ultimately impact lives, including our own. How we should move forward as a country is still very much an opinion rather than a fact, similar to this movie review. Two groups of people can see the same set of facts and disagree violently.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to persuade the other side to see things a certain way. On the contrary, we should speak and vote with the intention of changing the world. I just hope that you don’t cross the line of assuming their opinion is wrong. They aren’t wrong. They can’t be. By definition, opinions are never wrong.
Focus on the underlying facts and argue about whether the facts an opinion are based upon are right or wrong.
* this is my opinion 😎
hope our kids read this! 