There is an expression I heard years ago that has stayed with me:

Why go left? Why go right? Why not move forward?

The older—no, let me correct myself—the longer I live, the more wisdom I see in that simple question.

American politics provides an almost perfect laboratory for observing how firmly human beings can become attached to what they believe.

Every few years, during presidential elections, the country seems to divide itself almost neatly into two realities. One side watches a candidate and sees everything that is wrong with America. The other watches the same person and sees exactly what America needs.

Same person. Same words. Same country.

Two completely different realities.

And somehow, each side is absolutely certain.

I have watched presidential debates for many years, and I cannot remember hearing a candidate simply turn to an opponent and say something like:

“You know, I disagree with you about many things, but that was a good idea.”

Or:

“You handled that well.”

Maybe it has happened and I missed it. But if it has, it certainly does not seem to be the tradition.

Apparently, complimenting the opposition might be one of the last remaining dangers in American politics.

Years ago, I attended a meeting with Marianne Williamson, who later sought the Democratic presidential nomination in both 2020 and 2024. She was an unusual political candidate because much of her public work emphasized love, consciousness and a different way of approaching political life.

During the meeting, people were invited to submit written questions.

I wrote mine:

What do you like about the opposing candidate?

My question was not selected.

I still wish it had been.

Not because I was looking for a particular answer, but because I thought the question itself mattered.

If someone speaks about bringing more love into politics, surely one of the most interesting tests would be whether we can recognize something worthwhile in a person with whom we strongly disagree.

And this is not really about Marianne Williamson. It is about all of us.

We become remarkably attached to our beliefs.

Political beliefs. Religious beliefs. Cultural beliefs. Scientific beliefs. Spiritual beliefs. Beliefs about other countries, other generations, other groups of people—and especially beliefs about ourselves.

Once we decide that something is true, we begin collecting evidence that supports it.

Information that agrees with us feels intelligent.

Information that contradicts us suddenly becomes suspicious.

Sometimes you can place facts directly in front of someone and watch those facts bounce off an established belief system as though the belief were surrounded by bulletproof glass.

I am sure I have my own bulletproof glass too.

That may be the most important part to remember.

It is very easy to see rigidity in someone else’s thinking. It is considerably more difficult to recognize it in our own.

Perhaps one of the bravest sentences a human being can say is:

“Maybe I am wrong.”

Not you are wrong.

Not they are wrong.

Maybe I am wrong.

Or perhaps I am partly right.

Perhaps you are partly right too.

Perhaps neither of us can see the entire picture from where we are standing.

We live in a world of duality. Almost everything can be viewed from several directions. What looks beneficial from one perspective may create a problem from another. What solves one person’s problem may unintentionally create another person’s problem.

That does not mean there is no truth.

It means that truth may sometimes be larger than the piece of it that any one of us can see.

And there is another interesting thing.

Once we move beneath our arguments, most human beings actually want remarkably similar things.

We want to love and to be loved.

We want good health.

We want enough prosperity to live with dignity.

We want meaningful lives.

We want our children to be safe and to have opportunities.

We want peace.

Republican children do not need a different kind of love from Democratic children. Conservatives do not require a different kind of health from liberals. People in the political center do not have some completely different biological requirement for happiness.

Our disagreements are often enormous when we discuss how to reach the destination.

But perhaps the destination itself is not as different as we imagine.

This is one reason I find the idea of collective intelligence so fascinating.

Dr. Saulius Norvaišas’s Collective Intelligence platform is based on a very different starting point from the traditional debate: instead of beginning with personalities, parties and opposing camps, the objective is to identify ideas that can work for the whole.

Anonymity is an especially interesting part of the process.

Imagine encountering an idea without knowing who proposed it.

No Republican label.

No Democratic label.

No famous name.

No academic title.

No political enemy.

No friend whose opinion you feel obligated to support.

Just the idea.

Would we judge it differently?

I suspect we might.

Perhaps our greatest challenge is not that humanity lacks intelligence. Perhaps we have plenty of intelligence scattered among billions of people.

The problem may be that we are so busy defending our little piece of the picture that we rarely put all the pieces on the same table.

Changing your mind does not necessarily mean you were foolish before.

Sometimes it simply means that today you can see something you could not see yesterday.

And perhaps progress does not require everyone to move left.

Or everyone to move right.

Perhaps, occasionally, we could stop fighting over directions long enough to ask a much more useful question:

Which way is forward?

— J.B. Gattini
Founder & Editor
Enlightenment Media News