Sunday, January 27

"When someone opposes you, it is very tempting to oversimplify, parody, or distort his or her position. This is a counterproductive game, design both to harm the dissenter and to unjustly raise your personal status. By contrast, if you are called upon to summarize someone's position, so that the speaking person agrees with that summary, you may have to state the argument even more clearly and succinctly than the speaker has even yet managed. If you first give the devil his due, looking at his arguments from his perspective, you can (I) find the value in them, and learn something in the process, or (II) hone your positions against them (if you still believe they are wrong) and strengthen your arguments further against challenge. This will make you much stronger. Then you will no longer have to misrepresent your opponent's position (and may well have bridged at least part of the gap between the two of you). You will also be much better at withstanding your own doubts. (...)

To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. (...) The totalitarian says, in essence, "You must rely on faith in what you already know." But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be."

Jordan Peterson,  12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

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