The lost art of Dialectics
Martin Luther King Jr. has been one of the great philosophers, apart from being a civil right movement leader. His philosophy of ‘Dialectics’, which means ‘the art of investigating and discussing the truth of opinions’, is currently a tethered reality in almost every democratic or other set up of any form of government around the world.
Dialectic is a difficult proposition for any group that is sitting together to discuss the resolve to any problem nowadays. An honest discussion about the truth of any genre requires every human involved in the discussion to have just one pure intention - understanding to resolve. For this to happen, they need to have their minds free of any subjective or objective bias. Let us take an example to understand better -
The Trump administration was observed as an extremist for Minorities and Immigrants, which is an intersecting set of humans in the United States of America. But, there are millions of human beings in America that support Trump. In fact, two of my friends were convinced that he is a great Businessman and a visionary with an honest yapping tongue when he stood against Hillary Clinton in the Election campaign in 2016. One of them was my classmate while pursuing our masters in Automotive engineering in Michigan, and later became a flatmate when we started working in Michigan. The other friend was a colleague from work. Both these individuals had a high sense of the depth of life in my perception, concluded from our common conversations about the philosophy of life. Hence. I was extremely surprised at their analysis of Trump, even when he was just starting out, since my research about him showed that he will definitely show right-wing elitist colors as soon as he becomes President. Now the question is, why does the perception differ so much? To understand this, I had numerous sober and drunk conversations with them, who at that point of time believed Trump will be a great leader. The conclusion I could gather was that they looked at him like someone who was self-made, did not bull-shit about agendas, and everything coming out of his mouth was honest and a little non-traditional, which actually impressed them owing to the traditional political bored-ness they hated subliminally. Also, Hillary Clinton built a negative reputation through the ‘email’ fiasco. We had heated discussions about Trump as he started the Presidency and went on with his buffoonery at a level that is observed as one of the strongest positions in the whole world. But, at no point in our discussions did we decide to part ways as friends due to differing opinions. On several occasions, we agreed to disagree.
Hence, we were able to have multiple discussions after Trump became President, and I saw their opinion changing entirely within the first few months of Trump taking charge as the President of the United States of America.
To reflect back, and analyze why they saw Trump as a good businessman and honest to god human being, I found that Trump had a great marketing team at his helm to market this image. But he also marketed a ring-wing image to his real supporters - the white supremacists & the biggest organizations in America. His marketing campaign was working so well that Steve Forbes, the editor-in-chief of Forbes, endorsed his support to Trump initially in December of 2016 citing his allegiance to any Republican candidate. This and some other supporters of Trump shed light on a very visible, but conveniently ignored truth - we as human beings do not form our opinions about other human beings based on their actions anymore, we rather look at the group that this person is being endorsed by, and look at their past actions and achievements. Looking at the example of Steve Forbes, who at his title should be a very educated and sensible person in my perception, being fooled by the show that Trump put on using Republican party’s image and the enormous campaign money spent like the untimely rain that destroys the crops instead of empowering them, I could definitely agree on being more dialectic about all of politics to get it out of the gutter.
But one has to remember that ‘Dialectics’ is a philosophical path. It has to become part of the journalism and political communication between the Republicans. the Democrats and the Libertarians. This could happen if the format of the discussions and debates is changed to ascertain that an unbiased group of individuals from different walks of life are able to catch the mindless yap right away. But a deeper resolve will be to inculcate this philosophy heavily into the education system for not only journalism, social work and philanthropy, but in a certain depth in all fields.
A biased discussion is a reactive arena of curve-ball arguments and power-soaked divergent yaps at this point. If we do not agree to disagree, we will soon become the rebel to one cause - destruction of everyone who does not believe in our opinion. That is called ‘Narcissism’ and is the prime trait of any dictator who ever lived on the face of earth. Fortunately, in my personal opinion, Trump just brazed the outline of a dictator as his narcissism was crippled by his idiocy.
