Cherish Being Wrong
The best leaders adopt a scout mindset, and learn to listen.
Why have so many people refused to wear masks during COVID-19?
We’ve known the benefits of masks for some time now. We’ve known that the countries with masks have done better than those without. We’ve known that consistent, universal masking is the key to beating the pandemic.
But it doesn’t happen. America won’t “mask up.”
To this day, vigorous debates crop up on sites like Nextdoor, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn about the dangers of wearing masks, the lack of necessity for doing so — the supposed innocuousness of the deadly virus. COVID-19 is anything but innocuous, but if you listen to some of these people you might mistake it for a bad seasonal flu.
The people who hold these mistaken beliefs are utterly convinced they are right. They ruthlessly push their beliefs on others, with perfect conviction. Facts are meaningless to them. When confronted, they lash out. They are not citizens in search of truth — they are warriors in an epic ideological struggle.
Why?
Why can’t we rationally discuss the big issues of our day? Why has it become so difficult to confront our problems with an analytical mind frame?
