AN OPINION ABOUT OPINIONS!
We all have opinions about what we encounter in our lives wherever we are. These opinions are results of both the information we have and information we don’t have. In my observation, from the opinions I have seen people share and how they share them, I have come to a conclusion that many of us seem not to be aware that what we hold are opinions, and therefore we do not know how to generally express them as such.
We seem to rarely consider the possibility that there might be information that we do not have yet that might be relevant to what eventually becomes our opinion. This, I notice, seems to result into sharing opinions, somewhat authoritatively, dismissing any other differing opinions on the matter in question. There seems to be very low traces of humility in our opinions.
I think it might be important to come to an understanding that the knowledge we have about many things is often incomplete. Incomplete in the sense that there might be nuances that we may not account for because we are unaware they exist, assumptions that we do not even know that we make or have been biased by our beliefs or even have insufficient information about a topic.
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Having incomplete knowledge is not necessarily always with a negative connotation, because sometimes, even the incomplete knowledge serves a purpose that the complete knowledge might not.
So, ultimately, the challenges we face in our social interactions as humans regarding our opinions are often not about the opinions themselves, but rather how we share them, how we perceive them and how we react to them.
When scrolling social media platforms, reading people’s opinions, I am, for some of them, able to tell that they are coming from unconsidered nuances, assumptions or missed information. I am now thinking, given the little that I have read and understood about systems thinking, it would be in my best interest to use that knowledge to analyze what I see people sharing as their opinions. Because these opinions do not come out of the blue. There are incentives, constraints, feedback loops and eventually, thoughts and/or behavior that I see!
I do not know if having this information is a generally positive, neutral or negative thing, but from the looks of it, in my humble opinion, it feels like it is mostly positive. But of course, it serves different purposes to different people, and to some, it might not even serve any purpose. So, do with it what you may (or may not).
