A person is a bias. Every one of us lives inside our own bias and nowhere else. We agree with someone only because their bias happens to match ours; we disagree with someone because theirs does not.
When a question is weighing on you and you turn to the internet, you find it awash with answers of every kind. The one you click on is never the objectively correct one. What you open is a bias — the bias you wanted to see, a piece of evidence that somewhere out there, someone still stands with you.
We all swim in an ocean of bias. If the mind stays closed and the heart stays narrow, we only sink deeper into it. No amount of reading will help then; it only makes the disease worse.
The way out is to let two or more opposing views live in your head at the same time. The world is not black and white, and there is no such thing as the truth. Holding several biases usually beats holding just one — a room with several windows is better ventilated than a room with one window, or none at all.
Welcome views that differ from yours. A different view does not prove you wrong, and it does not prove you incapable. It makes you clearer-eyed and wiser: when you allow it to exist, when you can look at a thing from a complementary or even an opposing position, you grow stronger, and your heart grows wider.
Different views also make a person less arrogant and more humble. “Pride makes you fall behind,” the saying goes — but the saying is wrong. A person can afford to be proud when he genuinely has qualities or abilities that others lack. The saying should read: conceit makes you fall behind. Conceit belongs to those with nothing worth boasting about, who nonetheless feel superior to everyone around them. Inside, the conceited man is all black; he has no room for white. Yet we are meant to follow the way of heaven: no day without night, no hardness without softness. Contradiction living side by side is the world’s ordinary state — one yin and one yang, that is the Dao. The person who welcomes dissent into his own head is what we call a mature person.
The Daoists put it this way: for anything to thrive, it must allow what stands against it to exist freely. Everything has its opposite side. Where there is a front, make room for the back; where there is a back, make room for the front.
There is no truth in this world — the only truth is that there never will be one. Truth has to be explored, created, and examined; to pursue truth is to keep accepting the views that come closest to it.
Life, likewise, has no meaning of its own. The meaning of life lies in creating the meaning that you, and you alone, believe to be right. It is different for everyone. If meaning were fixed, then every happy person on earth would be living for the same meaning — and plainly they are not. What they do share is this: they are all working to create a meaning of their own.
Beijing
Comments
The moment I understood this, I stopped being afraid to speak my mind — loudly. I no longer fear that my view is wrong and someone else's is right, because there is no absolute right or wrong to begin with, and I welcome the people who hold opinions of their own. Their rejection makes me re-examine my thinking, their criticism keeps my feet on the ground, and their dissent makes my thought richer and more complete.