What’s your position?
How do you find a position on an important issue? With so much information, with so many dissenting points of view, with opinion clouding fact and with emotion ruling many arguments it is no wonder that people are confused.
Traditionally we have trusted information from the media to inform us, but the strategy of presenting opposing points of view seems to give equal weight to those perspectives when sometimes the views can be hard to support with evidence.
Often it is those with the loudest voice or who speak frequently that are heard, and through this obtain a kind of legitimacy.
If we are confused about what to thinking about the refugee crisis, climate change, increasing the GST, the slaughter in Syria, then we are going to have to do the research for ourselves.
What we shouldn’t do is listen to those with the loudest voice or the column in the most read newspaper, what we should do is listen to what the experts in their field are saying.
The opinions that we form should be based on facts not emotion and if it’s too difficult for us to understand sufficiently to take a position, then perhaps we shouldn’t argue an opinion at all.
