I'm genuinely uncertain if it is possible for people, especially people entrenched in belief, to put away their beliefs and offer blank intellectual ideas, unscathed by their biases. I think all people, if not most, agree that every individual has bias in one way or another. I believe that the key is to recognize one's bias and detach oneself from that bias. Yea, yea, I know you're probably thinking, "That's impossible". Simply, I disagree. Maybe some people do not have the emotional intelligence to separate their intellect, their brain power from their underlying bias flavor and apply it in a manner that adds to a collection of thoughts - a discussion.
I have yet to meet a group of people that could step into a room, vomit their bias up into a bucket as they walk in, sit down, and be calm enough to hear "taboo" ideas. I don't like the idea of ideas being "unspeakable", "unthinkable", or otherwise "taboo". Surprisingly, we can all think of ideas that would make any regular room of people extremely uncomfortable. What I'm trying to figure out is if it is possible to eradicate that discomfort to a level that everyone in the room will take a presented statement and instead of reacting to their idea of how they would normally react (personal bias), or react dictated by the social norm (social bias), they would take the statements and dissect them with their mind, completely oblivious of the implications of said statements.
For example, if I said, "Slavery of the African American community was a positive occurrence, and it should have kept going into current day", or, "God does exist, there is proof of his existence", or even far more gruesome (social bias, again) instances that are difficult to utter without prefacing them with a thousand "warnings" distancing yourself from your own thought ("I'm not racist, but... I'm not trying to be mean, but... etc) then the immediate reaction is to look incredulous, insulted, and not entertain the thought even for a second (social bias). I'm wondering if there are people out there that can entertain ideas that most people would consider "appalling" and not necessarily go straight 180 and accept them as true (personal bias), but simply be able to discuss them without immediately attaching the uttered idea to the utter-er with judgement. Simply stating an idea does not 1) necessarily mean you believe the idea, or 2) that you have an emotional attachment to the idea. Literally, a place where any thought counts as equal, and every thought is immediately detached from the speaker as a person, but simply a suspended idea to be dissected cold bloodily, analytically by a group of people using their mind devoid of irrational emotion (and yes, I believe there is such a distinction between rational and irrational emotion). The ability to separate an idea from a person's character seems impossible for a massive amount of people - the "you said it, you must mean it" mentality is pretty rudimentary and gives little credit to the human mind.
I'd be interested in meeting more people with that ability - not because I have socially awkward or tough ideas to discuss, but because if I did have an uncomfortable idea I'd be able to discuss it without prefacing it with an assortment of warnings - it would simply be implied, or even unnecessary, leading to an in-depth discussion of minds working together to casually push and prod each intellect further into thought and discussion. Bottom line, a pure appreciation of intellect, blind to the source - a little like art.
Listening to: Notorious B.I.G.
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