The Truth About the Rabid Polemics Surrounding Political Ideologies

I started having political arguments with friends and strangers as soon as I became an undergraduate in college. Yeez, I was taking courses in psychology, sociology, linguistics, history, English literature, and more, so i felt I was eminently qualified to have the “correct” views on just about any subject, given my vast knowledge. I took more courses and gained experience interacting with the many facets of society, the university, and people from all walks of life. This persisted into graduate school where, by golly, I felt I was in a privileged crowd of geniuses teaching me applied techniques in experimental and personality psychology. Aha! Now I am supremely informed about the world——so I got into rigorous political arguments with anybody who dared have a “wrong” or “ignorant” opinion on anything. I thought I was putting forth brilliant logical arguments with examples from real life and references to brilliant historical figures in various fields. It took several years for me to realize that I wasn’t winning any arguments with my superior intellect and knowledge. And whereas in the beginning I dismissed my opponents as “dull”, “naive”, or just “set in their ways”, eventually I came to realize that they were as educated as I was with degrees from Yale, U-Penn, Harvard, and The London School of Economics. What, they don’t teach students to think analytically at those schools? I had to figure out what the anomaly was in this impasse of political and social opinions.

It took several more years of me living in a quandary, but then I arrived at a conclusion—-an epiphany of sorts. Education in any of the social and behavioral fields (psychology, sociology, social work, economics, criminal justice, political “science”, anthropology, psychiatry, etc.) is vastly different from education in, say, chemistry or electrical engineering. What is being taught in courses in the social and behavioral fields is an indecipherable blend of quasi-facts and opinions presented as “truth.” No wonder I never won any arguments——everybody had his own version of the truth, totally resistant to counter-arguments. It was not education, it was opinions.

It only gets worse. I feel silly but I had been searching for the “truth” for many years, but now I have come to realize that maybe there is no truth in social, political, religious, and cultural matters. What I mean by truth is a standard universal trait on a particular matter like “justice for people from culture X.” Is there a universal “truth” for that? And if there is, is it knowable to everyone? What if it is not knowable to all——would it still be the truth? Who will make that decision?

So you see, I don’t want to end up becoming an existentialist, believing that there is no meaning in life, that everything is relative, that truth is slippery. I just avoid getting into political arguments nowadays because it would feel like two 8-year-old boys heatedly arguing which tastes better—-chocolate or strawberry ice cream? By golly, there is a one correct answer, right?