I came to a realization that I don't think the way a lot of other people do. I adjust my opinions based on received information. It seems like most other people adjust information based on their pre-existing opinions. That doesn't mean I just change my mind every time I hear something new. As seen with my recent change of attitude on global warming, I demand a lot of evidence and check things out before I will change my mind on something. And I don't mean that I never adjust things to fit my own opinions. I'm of the opinion, for example, that I should never have children because my genes are flawed and I have a duty to the human race to prevent their transmission. It would take a lot of evidence to change that opinion. But my point is that I will change my mind if I find out my information is flawed or incomplete.
I've learned only fairly recently that
this isn't how most people form their opinions. In my observation,
they get their opinions ready-made from other sources – from
friends, family, or other influences, and they choose the opinions
they like the best rather than the ones that are provably the most
valid. Then they evaluate anything they learn in terms of those
opinions, rather than the other way around.
I realized several years ago that there
are basically only four choices you can make when you learn something
new: you can accept it, reject it, ignore it, or modify it. And if
you modify it, you go back and decide again what to do with the
modified form.
I had to rework a lot of that when I
was recovering from my mental illness. I had to learn early on that
the way I'd been thinking most of my life was bad, and I needed to
develop a new way to do it. I ultimately arrived at my present method
by trial and error, and rebuilding my conscious mind from the base
upwards. The basic postulate was that I couldn't trust my own
thoughts, and so when everyone I knew agreed on something, I had to
accept they were right, whether I liked it or not. I think that last
clause is the part that came to separate my thinking from others. I
had to stop taking whether or not I liked an idea into consideration
when I formed an opinion. But once I got strong enough internally to
be able to resist some opinions I received, I still did it in terms
of whether or not I thought the opinion was right, not whether I
liked it.
I asked a question once, a long time
ago – Which do you care more about, who is correct, or who agrees
with you? I decided it was more important to have the right answer
than the most popular one. Now I think a better addition might be,
Why do we care about either? I accept that people have a right to be
wrong, and I care more about being factually right than popular. Yet
it bothers me that I don't think the way others do. I don't want to
change how they think, because that's not my place. I don't want to
change how I think, because I believe I'm right. So why do I care
that they don't agree? Why do they care that I don't agree? I don't
have a solid answer to that.
I always used to be a passionate and
emotional man, and people who have only gotten to know me recently
don't think of me as emotional at all. Things have changed. I'm not
who I used to be, and the main difference is that I've bleached a lot
of emotion from my mind.
I guess I can't say that my reliance on
facts always produces the best results – part of the reason my life
feels so empty since I've gotten better is that I don't have any
driving passion anymore. I exist to continue my existence. I need a
job to earn the money to pay my bills so I can keep going. But
there's no ultimate goal. I still desire death, really, more than
anything else. So you can hardly say I've got a healthy way of
looking at the world. And my idea that being accurate is better than
agreeing to the consensus is emotional – I hold that view because I
like it, not because there's a lot of evidence for it. So I'm not
really sure where I ought to develop my mind from here. I can keep on
the path I'm on, which seems to lead to accuracy tied with
despondency and emptiness. Or I can try to find something, anything,
I have positive feelings for, and develop that into a broader pallet
of emotions like I used to have. This could make me happier, or less
happy, or have no effect on it. It could make me susceptible to
things that are wrong. Or it could change nothing. I won't know
unless I try.
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