Opinion as Valid Self Expression

I encourage a ‘don’t knock it until you try it’ attitude about different behaviors (barring causing others non-consensual pain or oppression), yet I feel for those who define themselves as not liking green eggs and ham, even if they haven’t tried them. I don’t advocate confusing ‘I don’t like’ with ‘I am not’, but I do believe opinion can be a valid symbol expression of interior experience, and we need not try everything before we say it’s fine for Sam-I-Am, but it’s just not Who-I-Am.

Valid self-expression isn’t necessarily valid communication of course; but we don’t have to understand a person’s opinion and interior experience to believe they should have opinions and expression that works for them and their interior. And while people often hold opinions inadequately reflecting reality (or reality for a large number of other people, or even their own reality), those same opinions may remain adequate for their experience. This is often why trying to change people’s mind, their opinion, their effective symbol, is so difficult; people only willingly change symbols when they need a better symbol for their experience, only relinquish ineffective symbols when they know better symbols are already available. Yet when they need them, people tend to find better symbols on their own, and since I believe a person is their own best authority of what symbols express best for them, I also believe it’s better to let them discover those symbols on their own.

I do believe dialogue, communication, and the exchange of ideas may help people change their minds for their own interior reasons, but when we protest, lobby, pursue, pester and argue until a person relents and becomes convinced, I wonder how effective and adequate the resulting symbols will be. Teaching application of ideas without internal experiential basis is teaching people to ignore their experience as a valid and meaningful, and teaching internal ideology at the expense of adequate meaningful expression.

While I might not agree with a person’s opinion, or even believe there are better, more adequate opinions and opinion symbols for their experience than what they’re using, but because I understand our common human need to find adequate symbols of our experience, I don’t just defend their possession of the opinion they have, I defend their humanity, defend our common humanity, by affording them the opportunity of self discovery and not convincing them of anything.