Entertaining Ideas

No, this post is not about ideas that one might find entertaining. Some of these ideas may be entertaining, (by accident, mind you!) but that's not the point.

The point is this:

"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain an idea without accepting it."
-Aristotle

I simply love this quote. People would get along much better on the whole if they were, according to Aristotle, educated, or at least had this mark indicating such, by acting accordingly.

Why? It seems to me that the primary reason most arguments begin (other reasons notwithstanding) is that neither person can entertain (is willing to consider) the idea that the other person is trying to get across, or the idea that the other person might be correct. Another idea many who commonly get into arguments cannot seem to entertain is the idea that more than one person can be right. I admit personally that these are two very difficult ideas to entertain! You have to dance a jig and tell a joke, and even then it's a tough audience.

I have noticed (in hindsight) that in roughly 80% of the arguments I have been in, both participants were correct, and neither was willing to admit this possibility, resulting in only frustration and anger, and prolonging the argument.

This is an important concept to wrap your mind around (to entertain, if you will) and one that I believe even goes beyond the Aristotle quote above. Because it was stated so concisely and eloquently, I am including a portion here from an article in 2600 magazine (The Hacker Quarterly) that explains this very subject, in terms of the stigma and confusion surrounding the hacker group Anonymous:

"Because we have a culture where there are good guys and bad guys, we demand that those labels be used, and that people be lumped into either one or the other, preferably those who agree with us and those who don't. The problem is that when we do that without understanding why it doesn't actually work that way, we unfairly prosecute people who were doing the "right" thing, and wind up having to deal with people who have been mislabelled. [...] [Y]ou can't really destroy an idea unless you consider it. The problem is, once you open your mind and consider it, you may no longer disagree with it.

And that is the bottom line which creates and perpetuates both the fear and the paranoia [about Anonymous]: a sense that we might just be wrong. When you only ascribe to the "good" things with which you agree, you leave no place for learning from your mistakes. Thus, when we discover we have made mistakes, rather than being honest, meeting sympathetic eyes, and moving on, we must run and hide, begging forgiveness, or morph the mistakes into shell statements of what they actually were, devoid of any meaning, and shedding any potential lesson we could have learned. With this pattern, we learn to brush things we don't understand under the table, hoping they will go away and leave us alone." [1]

The drama about Anonymous aside, the author's point is a great one. When fully understood, it is quite profound, and opens your mind to a new way of thinking - a way of entertaining ideas, as Aristotle put it, without accepting them. If you can truly do this, you have not only proven yourself to have the mark of an educated mind - you've made a big step down the never-ending but enlightening road of education outside the classroom.

[1] aestetix, "Who Is Anonymous?" 2600 Magazine. Spring 2012.