Hey! It’s been around a little over a month since my last journal. Sadly, spring break is almost over, which to me officially marks the “final stretch” of exams, auditions, etc. until the school year ends—truly one big hassle.
For this journal entry, I’m going to log some of thoughts that coincide with and will probably prepare me for the June Symposium.
Starting off, a 3-word thing that can highlight my symposium speech/my EMC project as whole is “Everyone is misguided,” or something along those lines. As humans are naturally groupish, we often become more partisan and biased than we think we are. Stuck to one belief, we often engage in behaviors shown in the confirmation bias or the Elephant and the Rider theory. As a result, we are “misguided” by our own biology, a phenomenon that has been established through natural selection.
Accordingly, the one chapter in The Righteous Mind that summarizes my EMC project this year as a whole would probably be the last chapter “Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?” I chose this one because as the final chapter to the book, it discusses the most about Haidt’s take on Moral Psychology and its application to politics—a.k.a the “so what?” portion.
And this leads into the theme I think I want to take for my June Symposium. I want to talk mainly about Moral Psychology’s applications in politics as well as social media. I think it would be interesting to take ideas from my March editorial in regards to social media and bring it a step further by emphasizing how our groupish behavior especially lends itself to our polarizing politics today. I really admire Haidt’s conclusion to The Righteous Mind and I would love to strike a similar chord to that. After all, we should all try to work out our differences with one another and co-exist peacefully as one human race.