Brainlessness as a Media-Supported American Lifestyle — Columnist Kathleen Parker’s Accurate Perspective on the Utility of Actually Thinking

© 2011 Peter Free

 

12 June 2011

 

 

Columnist Kathleen Parker often brings common sense to the air-headed topics that the media (and its judgmentally air-headed substrate-fodder) conjure up

 

The amount of time the media has devoted to a politician with a penchant for photographing his underwear-clothed self is discouraging in a world filled with genuinely important problems and intriguing mysteries.

 

So is the amount of time that the thoughtlessly mouthy part of our culture spends attacking political figures who display a willingness to reconsider previous positions.

 

Recently, Ms. Parker wrote that:

 

A politician may be able to survive cavorting with prostitutes, sexting with coeds and commingling with interns, but heaven forbid he should change his mind — the transgression that trumps all compassion.

 

Or thinking.

 

In a saner world, we would not distrust those who change their minds but rather those who never do.

 

© 2011 Kathleen Parker, A defense of flip-floppery, Washington Post (10 June 2011)

 

 

If a medical doctor, surgeon, or scientist never changed his/her mind, how much confidence would you have in his or her ability to analyze the implications of new data and experience?

 

Or are you someone who thinks that limited data and superficial analysis are generally enough?

 

 

The term “flip-foppery” reveals limited intelligence

 

Some people like to divide issues into only two poles.  Doing so eliminates reality-based subtleties that their perceptual limitations can’t detect.

 

It is probably psychologically comforting to be an “either-or” person.  But that comfort generally comes at the price of successfully harmonizing one’s perceptions and behavior to the complex actualities that surround us.

 

The term “flip-flop” comes from two-pole thinkers.

 

It should be obvious that one cannot flip-flop, while adjusting one’s balance standing on a ball.  A freely orienting ball has no poles.

 

Living in dynamic Reality is closer to balancing on an erratically moving ball, than sitting on only one end of a stationary teeter-totter.

 

 

Why two-pole thinking gets us into trouble

 

If we assume that Reality has only two poles, when it in fact has no (or poorly defined) poles, we’re operating in a conceptual framework that does not fit experience.

 

That’s one definition of mental illness.

 

What does that say about our national political culture?