“Yeah, O’Bama and his cohorts are making up this terrorist threat for 9/11 just to divert attention from a failing economy!”
No, once again, I don’t really believe that. I made it up! But if I happen to hate him and/or “liberals”, I am inclined to interpret news in a fashion to confirm my bias and therefore arouse passions in similarly uncritical thinkers to hate him/them like I do. It is similar to the prophets of doom and catastrophe-monger-ers–they are full of existential insecurity and dread (i.e. the poison of self-loathing) and thus compulsively announce, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” The simpleton “birthers” and “O’bama is a Muslim” crowd are guilty of the same lack of critical thinking.
Now, conservatives are going to interpret O’Bama and liberalism from their perspective. And they should! We need different perspectives, certainly the conservative one. But it is important that conservatives, or liberals, or libertarians pause briefly before they make pronouncements and consider, “Now, am I just grinding my axe again?” Now most of us will, after that pause, go right ahead and grind our axe. I know I will! But it is important to pause, and in that pause, from time to time we might learn that there is another way of looking at things. And, it is important to look at things differently on occasion.
And this touches on a core issue in our culture right now—what is real and what is unreal. I am of the conviction (i.e. “bias”) that “real” is a very nebulous term. We are now at a point in our species development where we need to embrace the nebulous nature of reality and be willing to re-define a lot of the “categories” that we fall into and into which we project our world. But this kind of “sophistry” is anathema to the hyper-conservatives who are not willing, or able, to compromise with what they know to be “real.” An old fundamentalist bromide sums up this attitude, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”
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