Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Independent Thinker

If you think you’re independently minded, you’d be wrong.  Should you fancy yourself a free thinker, you’d be mistaken.  If you pride yourself on assessing the validity of two opposing views and presenting each one fairly, you are delusional.  Were you to claim dispassionate objectivity on a given issue, you’re even worse than I thought.  I’m sure you’re a nice person, someone who wants to do his or her part in ascertaining truth and fighting against social injustice.  You might be the rare type of person who owns up to your partisan bias.  I don’t know.  But if you like to present yourself as a sagacious person who knows all sides of an issue and whose final judgment on a certain matter is presumably a sound position, you’ll be unhappy to know that I see through you.  I have a keen nose for bias.

I still don’t know which kind of person I like less: the openly partisan individual who castigates the other side and tenaciously holds the party line or the self-professed independent thinker who likes to build mystique around his or her pronunciation as if it’s the gospel truth from the Oracle at Delphi when he (and it's mostly he) utters it.  I, Der Viator, your humble correspondent, am of course exempt from such foibles and peccadilloes that plague our species.  Yes, I’m probably the only independent thinker around.  So stay tuned to this blog, because you’ll be blown away by my analytical prowess and relentless pursuit of the truth.  Fortunately you have someone like me to provide you with objective viewpoints and non-partisan insights.  You're welcome in advance.