[denverkarma]

@mattrp, looks like we’re at the max thread depth. Thanks for your comment.

I certainly don’t mean to say people should shed their ideas, or that we should be starlings that flock together.

But I do think it’s important to see humanity as one species, one people, who have most things in common and thrive by working together constructively.

That’s why I feel it’s important to seek to understand the people who see the world differently than you, rather than just exist in blind opposition to them.

When we let our ideology define who we are it becomes a religion, and world history has plenty of examples of people taking religious ideology as a reason to blindly oppose and eventually wage literal war on “the other.”

Meanwhile, healthy mutual tolerance comes from seeking to understand and then arranging life in such a way that each person can have their own ideas and worldview without needing to quash the others.

To me that feels like just a description of liberal philosophy, so it’s surprising I most often have this conversation with friends leaning far left who are so angry they are thinking more in terms of how to wage a war than how to find a workable mutual tolerance.

[mercer]

I'm surprised that you're surprised. As far as I understand it one of the fundamental differences between what we generally call 'leftists' and 'liberals' is that the latter think we should solve problems by talking and trying to understand, whereas the former considers this as silly as expecting a slave to sit down with his masters and discuss the inconvenience of the beatings and workload.

Better for the slaves to sit down and write complex analyses on what is wrong about slavery and bicker amongst themselves about the details (I joke)!

But anyways, obviously most 'leftists' wouldn't equate slavery with their own situation, and I'd argue most of them do want to go as far as possible through understanding and conversation. But to some degree I'd say that's the basic point of view.