“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
These quotes by famous American author, Isaac Asimov perfectly describes what it feels to live life trapped inside the shady recesses of our own minds. We have all met individuals, with a rigid set of beliefs synonymous with their egos, they try to enforce upon others. What makes them tick?
Since ancient times, our ancestors had a tendency to worship anything beyond their comprehension - fire, water, rain and sun. While there is nothing wrong in believing things that ultimately enforce us in some way, most of these beliefs have no logical basis whatsoever. This kind of baseless thinking started infiltrating every aspect of their lives for generations, leading many of our forefathers to carry out meaningless, and often harmful practices such as child marriage and many others.
The catastrophic effects of believing things without questioning led people to take up arms against the innocent, sacrifice their own children to appease a certain "deity" and many more, that almost makes us lose faith in humanity.
Child sacrifice in Carthage(Source)
If we look carefully into all the greatest discoveries ever made, we'd see it creators and founders searching for clues, constantly changing their approach towards solving a problem. Open mind makes changes possible. It is impossible for an individual to accept the need to improve, and much less work towards improving them, with an unbiased guiding them properly.
As human beings, we are all prone to having a faulty thought process, that leads to make incorrect decisions for ourselves. But the deciding factor between repeating and learning from them, is the ability to isolate the source of a problem without any bias.Open-mindedness is really broad topic, that way. It is a precursor to an individual's entire value system. We might not believe in the sky falling over our heads, or wait for the black cat to cross the street, but we all have played the blame-game. We try to dismiss our involvement in all things negative, and in a constant state of denial, incapable of accepting our own mistakes.
Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest minds in history, reveals the method behind his scientific inventions
(Source)
Even in the age of technology, where science and logic dominates most of our lives, the internet, more than often gives us one side of many stories, leading us to believe in them. After all, is there anything more plausible than an obscure theory starting with two golden words "Research suggests..". Pseudo-science is the modern day version of the black cat. Its obscure nature, interspersed with technical jargon and some really convincing cherry-picked examples, make it difficult for us to tell them from genuine scientific theories. Some examples include psychokinesis, astrology and the flat-earth theory. Astrology and psychokinesis, exploit our tendency of believing what we want to be true.
Psycho-kinesis. Science or pseudoscience? (Source)
Faith and prejudices ,however, are not to be confused with one another. The former serves us for the better, and concerns with what we truly want for ourselves. The latter, on the other hand, is a consequence of incorrect assumptions, faulty correlation between events or simply believing someone else, without questioning it's fundamentals.
So how do we escape from the clutches of prejudice, when everything we want to know is only a few keyboard strokes away?
An excellent way to do this is to search for the exact opposite theory.