Everyone has a model of the world they may not even know they are carrying around in the back of their head. Most of us think we get around pretty well with our model. I cannot fault anyone for operating this way as the absence of a model yields a kind of paralysis... and yet... I cannot view history or the news and still think people are aware of how much they prefer fitting the evidence of their daily experiences into that model over just seeing what happened and leaving model making for later. Look closely: many people you know, every day, demonstrate that they would rather feel justified than be healthy, that they would even prefer to bask in the deep sensation that they are right than to live. In some simple, primative world where assumptions usually held up, reliance on stereotype stood in well enough for policy and was safe enough to use in lieu of researched deliberation. And boy, did it ever save time, a virtue such "thinking" still enjoys. But here we are piling world on world, each group highballing its train to a station called the future. Who thinks there is more than one future? What happens when all the trains headed full tilt for the same spot finally meet? The only way we will survive is if there is only one train and we are all on it. That model train is the one that events are trying desperately to teach us.
The opinion truly worth holding, the one that will promote equally your wellfare and that of others, welcomes all tests and will not require the armor of willful ignorance and selective perception.
To tackle this train wreck on the upstream or input side, consider this:
As unconscious as our true educations have been, we can generally be characterized as having acquired our models of reality through a series of accidents, some of them staged by our parents or our teachers. How on earth can we expect not to then go on and conduct a life full of accidents?
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