Opinion: It’s Important To Hear Blatant Lies From Both Sides Before Forming Your Opinion On Any Political Issue

It’s time to talk about a troubling trend in how we handle our national discourse: the current political landscape is full of lies, half-truths, and fake news, but the average person only ever consumes half of that. Thanks to people being ever more partisan in their news consumption, most people are only exposed to one distorted version of reality, completely missing out on an equally ludicrous alternative version of events.

This is a crisis. Voters are going to the polls having been manipulated by only one side, scared into voting by one set of myopic irrational fears and not hearing the alternative nonsense that could have resulted in an equally uninformed vote in another direction. Everyone is increasingly comfortable with “their” hyperbolic trolls, seeing only one side as basically Hitler instead of recognizing the Hitler in everyone.

This has to end. People need to broaden the propaganda they listen to and be exposed to all the incorrect ways of looking at an issue. Listening to only one set of lies is part of what leads to all the destructive anger in our politics, but if people only opened up and really listened to all falsehoods, they could replace that anger with much healthier confusion.

And maybe, just maybe, people might stumble onto something real. Two half-truths added together equals a whole truth. That’s just math.