If someone were to tell you to despise a person you’ve never met, would you go along with it?
Most of us would like to think that we’re much too reasonable to go along with such a command without first having a good reason to do so.
At the same time, it’s likely that many of us have encountered provocative stories or discussions about unpopular public figures and have piled on without hesitation.
This is the power of the angry mob to short circuit our ability to think rationally.
This is because enemy-driven thinking appeals to our base emotions like fear, anger and envy.
When we encounter others telling us that someone is deserving of our disdain, we should be asking ourselves, “What do I actually know about this individual that wasn’t told to me by someone else?”
Most of the time, the answer will be, “Very little.”
In other words, the only thing we can know for certain when a person is being publicly attacked is that he or she is strongly disliked by those doing the attacking.
Before jumping on that bandwagon, we may want to do our own fact-checking to see what we’re not being told.
We may just find that we’ve been shown a one dimensional caricature of that person by someone with an agenda of their own.
Whenever possible we should go to the source.
This is a good way to avoid being manipulated by our emotions into advancing someone else’s agenda.
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