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" Consider the possibility that we are sometimes helpless to believe anything else because we literally can't understand the validity any position but our own.
I know because this is exactly what happened to me.
I was speaking with a friend and I asked, "How are you?" "Great," he said.
When I asked why, he responded, "Because of the election in Massachusetts.
" My friend was referring, of course, to the news that Scott Brown, a Republican, had won the Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy.
When I asked what in particular he liked about those results, he said that Brown's victory would likely ensure that "healthcare reform" would be brought to a halt.
Additionally, my friend noted, President Obama had never even tried to bring the Republicans into the process of reform.
At that moment, I felt like the Aztec Indians who, the story is told, were literally unable to see the Spanish ships offshore because they had never seen ships with sails and, therefore, had no pattern in their brains corresponding to "sailing ships.
" In other words, I literally couldn't see what my friend was talking about, so completely was I blinded by my opposite opinion.
It's not that I refused to see my friend's position.
I literally didn't see it.
I was reminded, yet again, that conflicts in both our personal and international relations so often go unresolved because we literally can't see the validity of one another's positions.
John Gray captured some of this in gender relations when he proclaimed that "men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
" I recalled something I had read years ago in Fast Company magazine in an article called "Change Or Die" (May, 2005).
In the article, George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at University of California at Berkeley is quoted as saying that, "We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain.
Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out.
They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid.
" Talking to my friend reminded me once again of the importance of listening when someone disagrees if I have any hope of resolving the conflicts in my life.
After all, if a "fact" doesn't "fit what is already in the synapses of (my) brain," I'll ignore that fact (the same thing occurred in a different context, when we all thought we were rich because it's a "fact" that real estate prices always go up.
).
Or as that famous philosopher Pogo said, "We have seen the enemy and he is us.
"
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