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 offers an interesting example of how firmly human beings can become attached to what they believe. During presidential elections, it sometimes feels as though the country divides itself into two completely different realities: one person looks at a candidate and sees everything that is wrong with America, while another looks at exactly the same person, hears the same words, and sees something entirely different.

Same person. Same country. Very different pictures.

And somehow, each side can become absolutely certain that its picture is the complete one.

I have watched many presidential debates over the years, and I cannot remember hearing candidates very often turn to an opponent and simply say, “You know, I disagree with you about many things, but that was a good idea,” or, “You handled that well.” Perhaps it has happened, and I missed it, but it certainly does not seem to be a political tradition.

Apparently, complimenting the opposition may be one of the remaining occupational hazards of American politics.

Years ago, I attended a meeting with Marianne Williamson, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2020 and 2024 election cycles. During the meeting, people were invited to submit written questions, and 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 any particular answer, but because I thought the question itself was interesting. If we want a different kind of political conversation, surely one of the harder tests is whether we can recognize something worthwhile in a person with whom we strongly disagree.

And this is not really about Marianne Williamson, or even about politics. It is about all of us.

We become remarkably attached to our beliefs—political, religious, cultural, scientific, spiritual, and even personal. Once we decide that something is true, information that agrees with us tends to feel intelligent and reassuring, while information that contradicts us can suddenly seem suspicious. Sometimes you can almost watch a fact bounce off an established belief system as though the belief were protected by bulletproof glass.

I am sure I have some bulletproof glass of my own.

That may be the most important part to remember, because it is very easy to recognize rigidity in someone else’s thinking and considerably more difficult to recognize it in our own.

Perhaps one of the bravest sentences any of us can say is simply:

Maybe I am wrong.

Not you are wrong. Not they are wrong. Maybe I am wrong—or perhaps I am partly right, you are partly right, and neither of us can see the entire picture from where we are standing.

That does not mean there is no truth. It simply means that truth can sometimes be larger than the particular piece any one of us happens to see.

Once we move beneath many of our arguments, we also discover that human beings often want remarkably similar things. We want to love and be loved, to enjoy good health, to live with dignity, to find meaning, to see our children safe and given opportunities, and to live in peace. Our disagreements may become enormous when we discuss how to reach those goals, but perhaps the destination itself is not always 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 begins from a very different place than the traditional debate: rather than starting with personalities, parties, labels, and opposing camps, it asks us to examine ideas themselves and consider whether they may contribute something useful to the whole.

The element of anonymity is especially interesting to me. Imagine encountering an idea without knowing who proposed it—no Republican or Democratic label, no famous name, no academic title, no political opponent, and no friend whose opinion you feel obligated to defend.

Just the idea.

Would we judge it differently?

Perhaps we would.

Maybe humanity’s problem is not that we lack intelligence. There is an extraordinary amount of intelligence, knowledge and experience scattered among billions of people. The difficulty may be that we become so busy defending our own little piece of the picture that we rarely place all the pieces on the same table.

Changing your mind does not necessarily mean that you were foolish yesterday. Sometimes it simply means that today you can see something you could not see before.

And perhaps progress does not require everyone to move left, or everyone to move right. Maybe, once in a while, we could stop arguing about directions long enough to ask a different question:

Which way is forward?

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