Plurality of perspectives

People often write blogs and newsletters to improve their English, share knowledge, or build a personal brand. While those are valid motivations, I believe there’s a deeper, more fundamental reason to engage in public writing — one that challenges our modern understanding of truth and discourse. For that you have to separate the world into your private world, where your perspective is the only one that counts, maybe you can also add your family and friends to that but even with that most of your surrounding have the same opinion. And there is the public world or even the political world how Hannah Arendt framed it. Here you have a plurality of perspectives, where individual private worlds converge, each attempting to assert its own reality. In the ancient Greek world, it was common to share ideas, have different views and be ok with different views. You have a different opinion, I respect you nevertheless.

Somehow, we lost this skill in the modern world. We only think in, so called “echo chambers”. Because there are so many informations bombarding us so we have to decide: Do we trust these guys or the other guys. And this decision, most of the time, is derived from our private world. In Psychology you call this in-group bias. It’s a specification of the confirmation bias, where you do the things that confirm your surroundings or own opinion. Ingroup bias means we divide the world into the in-group, the people who are similar to us and outgroup, the people who look different and think differently.This influences most of our political opinions.

I think we have to come back to the Ancient Greek world, where everyone who shared and thought in the private about his opinions can give his perspective in the public and we don’t just judge, but integrate these diverse viewpoints into our own understanding. Public is a plurality of perspectives and each perspective on its own is flawed and wrong and we are missing something that can be added with all the different perspectives of the world. With that we are creating the “public perspective”. One, that is still wrong but less wrong than my own perspective. So my goal here is to share my own perspective of the world and maybe add a bit to your perspective.