The Surprising Benefits of Embracing an Idea You Strongly Disagree With

My name is Roi Ben-Yehuda, and I want you to ask just one question.

Can you embrace an idea that you vigorously disagree with?

Not only I think you can, but I think you should. The world is complex, and yet we reduce it to a narrative that avoid any nuance and any contradiction, and so we misunderstand reality. We belong to tribes, we belong to moral tribes, to ethnic tribes, to religious tribes, and those tribes tend to be ideologically homogeneous.

It is these perspectives, and these narratives, and these identities, that themselves legitimize exclusion of the other, and violence towards the other, and make constructive dialogue within groups, and between groups, a lot less likely. Challenging an idea that the tribe shares collectively is quite risky. On the one hand, you have the risk of being unpopular, and the other extreme, you also have the risk of facing violence as a result of taking an unpopular perspective.

You are not a hundred percentright, nobody, no individual or no group is a hundred percent right, and when you have more diversity of opinion, it leads to not only more tolerance towards others, but it leads to more constructive dialogue between groups. In order to do that, you need to cultivate at least two qualities.

The first one is intellectual empathy, not just feeling with somebody else, but generously imaging what it’s like to think as another person. The second one is integrity, and by that, we mean not losing sight of your principals, your core principals and core values that anchor the world views that you hold.

If you just have one, if you just have empathy without integrity, you are an intellectual chameleon. If you have integrity without empathy, you’re dogmatic, you are rigid, you are unbending.

Here’s a question I would like you to ask yourself: Can I embrace an idea that I vigorously disagree with?

For twenty-four hours, entertain an idea that offends you.

Look for information that confirms that perspective, and if you’re really brave, post it on your Facebook page, surprise all your friends, all your network, all your community, with this new perspective, and see what happens, see what kind of conversation ensues. What other questions do you think people should be asking? Write them in the comment section, and don’t forget to subscribe.