In the real world, we meet and interact with people of different backgrounds and belief systems, people with varying political views and religions. In the virtual world, we still do, except it’s so much easier to remove and block those whose opinions are different from ours, therefore creating customized communities of people who are just like us. We feed ourselves with information and opinions that strengthen those we already have, while shutting out those that challenge us and contradict us. It builds up the mentality of groupthink.
The thing is though, if we keep to ourselves or to curated communities where we only agree with each other, we miss out. We become one-dimensional, never expanding our perspectives, strengthening this illusion we hold so dearly that we are right and those who are different from us are wrong. Our black-and-white view of the world becomes strengthened, the othering becomes justified, and we become more judgmental. There is a “reward” of course. We never have to admit we are wrong, we don’t have to question our belief systems, we spare ourselves from the agony of our ideas being rejected. But there is also a “cost” to it. We miss out from the possible connections with people just because they are different from us. We miss out on seeing the beauty of other souls because we are attached to seeing the differences. We miss out on how expansive the world is because we are insistent it has to be only one way. The Sufi poet Rumi said: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”
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