Bias Society

In class on Friday, we discussed Rousseau’s ideas as being right in principle, but wrong in practice. Dr.J made the point that many times in our society, people are correct about their principles, but no one will accept their principles because the person is wrong about the ways in which we should practice their principles. Thinking over this class discussion, I immediately began to realize a common theme from the different ideas we have studied over the course so far. Almost everything we have studied seems to be correct in some way, but many times people will discredit whole ideas because they have a few problems. I feel that if our society is going to make progress, we will need to be less quick to ignore ideas that we do not fully agree with. When we first studied Christianity, many people were quick to ignore all the ideas that this religion offers just because they disagreed with a few. I think it is important that we use some of the ideas that Christianity offers; things like peace, love, and turning the other cheek could be very useful if they were more important in our society. I think another example of this would be Hobbes’ principles. Many people are quick to avoid his ideas because the ideas are pessimistic. If people would actually study his ideas, they would be very useful. Our society is known for being afraid of accepting ideas that are different, and I believe this is one of the major flaws of our society. If we would use our reasoning to consider the actual usefulness of people’s ideas, our society would run a lot more productively.

Is our society bias as a whole, and if so, how can we reduce this bias?