Liberals and Conservatives Hate The Same Things…

They just hate each other too much to work together to come up with a solution.

Think about it. They need the same things. They face the same issues. They just have different ideas about what caused the issues and how to fix it now. Often, they blame each other for causing the issue even when this is not true, thus causing them to disagree with each other on everything purely on premise. The thought process is along the lines of “Well, it’s your fault we’re here at all, so I’m not listening.”

Obviously, when people stop listening to each other, the problem gets worse. They begin to only think about what they were taught is right and ignore the ideas of other people. The other person’s idea may be the exact same as their idea, but they are too stubborn to listen to each other.

One time, two of my family members were fighting because of a prior agreement over a video game. They both agreed to the terms, but they understood it differently. Then, when the second person wanted to play their turn, they both got angry because both of them thought the other person was going back on their deal. Truthfully, they were both correct in their actions according to their interpretation of the deal.

This same thing happens in our highest decision-making processes. Many people are not conditioned to be open-minded, especially if they have been doing political work for the same party or orientation for a long time. They become used to one way of thinking and can find it very hard to reverse or even occasionally bend their way of thinking to come to a conclusion (see my article “The Dangers of Binary Thinking” for a deeper look).

This isn’t necessarily their fault usually. This is caused by our socialization. People in different countries are raised differently, and people belonging to different groups within countries are raised differently. Alberta has a whole different common socialization than Ontario, and that is why they kind of hate each other. Without even meeting a person from there, we generalize all people of a certain place or group to be the same, meaning that we can hate all of them equally. We are taught from birth proper ways to act in certain places around different people. In the beginning, children find this hard to understand because it isn’t in our nature to hate people who are different than us. We are taught that different is dangerous, but we are hardly ever told why. And many parents will give the explanation of “because that’s just how it is” for many of the concepts we learn. We believe them because we trust them to keep us safe and happy and good.

Not only do our families dictate our political orientation and the way our brain works to interpret the world; so do our peers and teachers and role models. They have a greater influence than our families from the time we start going to school all the way through to potentially our 30s. This is why peer pressure is such an issue, and why we believe that teachers are always right. After all, they did get a fancy piece of paper that says they know stuff, so they can never lie… right? Also, how many people got into climate change activism only after Leonardo DiCaprio did? Just saying. Other people have so much influence over us that they can make us believe that the earth is flat if they tell us enough times. We all have influenced the mental development of someone we are close to, and it could be as small as how they put jam on their toast or as huge as the religion they follow. One person can be the difference between pro-life or pro-choice, Muslim or Christian. We largely underestimate our influence on other people, and that is why our bad habits will likely last generations.

If we want to change how our country is run, how the people in it think, and how problems are solved and prevented, we need to develop better listening and thinking skills. We need to stop deliberately passing on our biases and opinions onto the next generation without giving them the objective opportunity to find their own way. We need to work on ourselves as the leaders of right now to be effective at communicating and solving problems by working with others. We are all going to have to do work to get better at helping the state of the world. It’s going to take preventing future mistakes while also learning from the past and keeping track of the present. Most of all, if we stop hating each other for the sake of hating each other, we can find value in each other’s ideas. We could work together to create change that helps everyone. We could think critically about each issue and come up with new ideas our ancestors never predicted. This is a crucial step to civilization that we seem to have skipped while trying to get as rich as we can, and it could be the downfall of human society. Biases and the inability to push past them have caused many wars in the past, so how about we start changing that?

Until next time, keep thinking outside the box, and keep reading in between!