A lesson in listening and respecting opinions

The World Wide Web, which was fully woven into the vast expanse of space in the 1990s, provided an opportunity for dialogue and the exchange of ideas that was not available in the preceding centuries.

Through comments, likes, dislikes, objections, criticisms, attacks, and accusations, positions are formed, policies are drawn, and biases appear here and there, on the banks of alignments and agendas.

In the daily scene that flows to the point of drowning and closure, the rope of truth is mixed with the arrow of the closed triviality in the bubble, and the interveners are equal like the teeth of a comb, young and old, educated and illiterate, thinkers and closed-minded, in the innovation of tapping their fingers on the keyboard, hidden behind heavy curtains of darkness in their “comfortable caves”, saying and chattering about what they do not know, chanting, betraying, glorifying, arguing, blaming, and fighting with sharp tongues, classifying people according to their own catalogues, for that does not cost them anything as long as they express their ideas and biases, even if they cut off the heads of their opponents with the swords of their words and accusations, and shed their souls. All of that does not matter to them, what matters to them is the only pleasure of the moment of clicking and the skill in luring the opponent, without the slightest regard for the freedom of others to differ in opinion.

It is the “bubble” polluted with ideas, not reconciled with those who oppose it or question its correctness, and which must be dissolved with the vaccines of knowledge and acceptance of what is different from it, as well as what is compatible with it, in order to preserve the strength of the alert mind protected from futility, improvisation, and lack of imagination.

Former US President Barack Obama tells a remarkable story in the context of the debate between people with different opinions, saying: “One of the less capable and competent representatives angrily said to a colleague who was older than him in age, experience, knowledge and culture: (This is just your opinion, and I have a different opinion), so his colleague the representative responded by saying: (Sir, you have the right to have your own opinion, but you do not have the right to have your own facts).”