Issue Essay 3
"We can usually learn much more from people whose views we share than from people whose views contradict our own; disagreement can cause stress and inhibit learning."
To be successful in life, there exists one guaranteed method - increasing knowledge. A person who explicitly aims to improve his knowledge base by reading, researching and conversing with different people on an intellectual level, is sure to do better in his chosen profession.
This interaction is called learning, and there is only one way, again, to implement this - by interacting in as many ways as possible, with as many people as possible. In this way, a person will be able to extricate the best and worst out of everybody he meets; using this, he will refine the best and eliminate the worst from his repertoire; and he will thus extract the fullest gain from his experiences.
Given this view of the quest of knowledge, I tend to disagree to a very large extent with the given issue topic. I propose, instead, that the best possible method to learn is by interacting mainly with people whose views differ from one's own, and being able to use these experiences to benefit oneself.
The questions of existentialism play a role in such a stance, including questions such as the extremely profound query, "why is it that human beings exist on this planet"? The citizens of the world today exist and prosper because of the cornucopia of ideas that abound amongst them. These include originality of thought and expression, as well as artistic concerns such as painting and literature. The essence of existence today is the analysis, admiration and implementation of these ideas. If people lived in their closed cocoons and refused to let other points of view "infect" them, a world as vibrant as the one that exists today, would be no more than a myth. The world would be a collection of closed, hostile groups, each having their own theories and with absolutely no interest in other points of view. Such coteries would be the bane of progress; it would logically lead to situations where issues such as freedom of speech, that essential factor that defines democratic countries today, would be a myth.
Such people who rely only on their own principles would be causing their own downfall. It is axiomatic that exposure to varied paths of knowledge is necessary for improvement and refinement of learning - the contrast between the famous communist Karl Marx and the well-known objectivist author Ayn Rand's writings are an example of how society has benefitted from duality in points of view. Karl Marx believes that "equality and egalitarian systems are the most beneficial to a society in total" . Ayn Rand believes in that cliche, "every man for himself". These vastly contrasting points of view can owe their existence, ironically, to the presence of the other. It is because Ayn Rand studied, and rejected, the tenets of communism that her writings are so popular and well-received today. It is because Karl Marx analyzed other popular modes of government and chose his version of the best practical scheme of governance, that communism was and is an accepted form of governance today.
There is one point that the topic makes, that is relevant in today's world. It is a known fact that people tend to congregate in groups having common interests; this is a natural tendency of human beings. Views opposed to the ones a person has been brought up to believe in, are sometimes very hard to comprehend or accept, however logical they may seem. This "stress" is a significant factor contributing to the reality of the quest for learning.
To conclude, it is reiterated that learning only happens if the inputs and contributions are varied. A seeker of knowledge would eminently prefer eclectic sources to dogmatic ones, purely because he knows that more issues have been analysed and tested before a conclusion was reached. As an old Indian saying goes, "one who hears many voices listens to some; but one who hears only his own voice listens to noone."