The Middle Ground

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.”

The world would be much different if opinions didn’t exist.

Eight billion people agreeing on everything from Lebron being better than Jordan all the way to which country creates the best wines.

Opinions help shape cultures and communities. Forums in Rome we’re used to express opinions.

But we’ve migrated from forums to tweet strings and reddit threads.

Digital dialogues have altered public discourse at scale — but we’ve lost the accountability factor.

An exchange between opinions in the modern age requires nothing more than 140 characters.

But when we aim to find the middle ground, is when we reach empathy.

Something interesting I came across recently titled the Four Quadrants of Conformism.

Author Paul Graham wrote a synopsis of how people's personalities vary in any two ways, then separated them as axes and gave the resulting four quadrants personality types.

This is a perspective on how our varied personalities affect culture, law, and the communities we all interact in.

Classifying a diverse set of people into four boxes is may raise an eyebrow to some — but it makes you think more on how much can influence (or not) an individual.