Tonight, I am going to share a counter example with you. The way these protestors are behaving is exactly the opposite of how you should strive to live your life. If someone wants to promote an idea, you don?t block the doors and keep people out (doing so only indicates you fear what they say). Instead, you throw open the doors, turn on the spotlights, turn up the microphone, and then invite the informed to debate, discuss, evaluate, weigh, measure, and work out whether there is truth in the idea. You do not demonize your opponent. You don?t attack him or her as a person. It?s about the ideas. Good people can have terrible ideas and bad people can have excellent ideas. To think otherwise is to suffer from the halo and horns effect mental model and the mere association mental model.
If you stray from that willingness to consider all evidence, especially evidence that is counter to your core beliefs, you are setting yourself up for foolishness. You will see the world how you think it is, and not how it actually is. That?s not ideal. To use an example we?ve discussed in the past, it is this mental tragedy that explains how you get entire civilizations of people who will murder their neighbors as heretics for daring to question the barbaric practice of sacrificing newborn infants to a harvest god so the wheat grows a little higher.