The Glorification of Opinions
“Non-white people deserve the same rights as white people.”
“I don’t think they do.”
“What—”
“That’s my opinion. You have to respect it.”
In America, respecting other people’s opinions is a major ideal that many believe in. We encourage people to hold onto friendships with those that have different political beliefs than us, no matter how major they may be. We take pleasure in sharing our own opinions on topics that we may be experts in as well as topics we know next to nothing about.
I’ve grown up accepting this ideal without really questioning it. “The beauty of America is that everyone can think and say whatever they want,” my parents told me. But now, I can’t find a reason to believe that opinions are sacred. I don’t see how society benefits by treating random, uninformed opinions with the same respect as those of an expert. For example, I see too often that a random person’s opinions on climate change and a climatologist’s opinions on climate change are given equal weight.
Take this scenario: There’s a lawsuit against McDonald’s claiming that something is wrong with the hamburgers. All your friends are talking about it, making comments on whether or not they like the hamburgers. Every single person you follow on Instagram has made some sort of post about what they think about the hamburgers.
But you only have so much time in the world. If all you want to do is discuss everyone’s subjective opinion about McDonald’s hamburgers, you don’t really want to know about the lawsuit. You simply view the lawsuit and media coverage as an occasion for you, your friends, and the news to say their own opinions.
If you wanted to know more about the lawsuit and make a judgement as to whether or not McDonald’s is doing something wrong, you’d learn about fast food, the McDonald’s company, how hamburgers are made. You’d read up on how corporate lawsuits work, and what evidence either side would need to win.
Unless your friends work for McDonald’s, if there was a problem with the hamburgers, they wouldn’t know, and they wouldn’t give you useful information.
Because of this “opinions are sacred” ideal, I see people complaining that their schools or workplaces don’t tolerate them saying slurs or other bad things against certain groups of people. How does society benefit by tolerating hate speech? Take another, much more serious example: Two women have been friends since elementary school. One thinks gay marriage should be illegal. The other is a lesbian.
“We should still be friends,” says the homophobic woman.
Others tell the lesbian woman that she can’t cut someone out of her life just because they have different opinions than her.
But why? Why is a gay person obligated to stay friends with a woman who is against a core part of her identity? Why does she have to stay friends with someone who votes against her rights?
Too many people get sucked into this mania of believing that finding out what everyone thinks is the exciting part, and reading and organizing people’s opinions is the “real” part of understanding an issue. It isn’t. Don’t let “that’s their belief” justify hate, from you or from anyone else. Our society has put people’s opinions on a pedestal, but you don’t need to be a worshipper.
by GRACE YANG