Egocentric Blindness

There is a revolution occurring in America. This revolution is not fought with guns or swords but rather with information. The enemy is misinformation and how rapidly it spreads is only the start of the problem. The American society has steadily shaped its citizens into uncritical thinkers that accept any form of propaganda as truth, simply because it is on the internet or spoken by a well-known figure. As citizens of the United States of America we have a civil responsibility to seek education and acquire knowledge, then use that knowledge to educate others. One of the problems facing America is that there is basically no civil discourse taking place. Civil discourse is engagement in conversation with the intention of enhancing each other’s …show more content…
There are two quotes that offer an alternative view on the main points of the paper, they are, “the roadblock to enlightenment is both ignorance and the illusion of knowledge” and to help decipher that is the quote, “The antidote to ignorance is knowledge” (Scanlin, Dr). This being said, to eradicate the widespread ignorance in America there must be an influx of pure, objective information. Even though egocentric blindness can be difficult to distinguish from egocentric memory there is a key difference. To clarify, egocentric memory tendency to forget evidence and information that rivals preconceived notions but egocentric blindness is the tendency not to notice the information in the first place. To help illustrate egocentric blindness here is an artificial scenario, there is a supporter of Hillary Clinton and a Donald Trump supporter who become locked in a political argument. The Hillary supporter accuses Donald Trump of cruel business practices and being arrogant beyond belief and the Trump backer goes after Hillary for the email scandal and the Benghazi incident. Regardless of one’s personal views both parties here perfectly capture the essence of weak-minded, uncritical thinkers. This is because rather than having a fair, rational debate they both completely ignored the weak points of their own side and chose to take shots at the opposing candidate. That “debate” method is an alternate version of the Ad hominem strategy which is, the guideline that one should not attack a person but rather the argument at hand as stated as one of the Ten Commandments of Rational Debate listed on Relatively Interesting’s website. The Hillary supporter could have rebutted and brought up the email scandal themselves therefore, admitting that their candidate isn’t perfect or they could have just kept the focus of the debate strictly