You Are NOT Entitled to Your Opinion—Who Told You That?

No one's going to put you in a pen for your thoughts. Look around—neo-Confederates, Incel psychotics, Vaccine mythologizers, Nickelback fans, and Rudy Giuliani are all running wild and free. Asher Black asks, "Are you really ENTITLED to your beliefs?"

All right, here we go. For another episode of Manhearted, the show about being a man I'm Asher black, your host powered by spunk. And once again, we'll aim to get to the heart of manhood. Now, in this episode, I want to pick up on something that we left off within the previous one, which is the topic of belief. Now I mentioned a couple of things. I'm going to state them again. And then we'll, we'll go on.

My generation, grew up hearing that they have the right to believe, whatever they want. And no one pointed out that rights only work in a context of rationality and beliefs are supposed to correspond to reality. And so of course, what we have now is people believing all kinds of things without any felt need for those things to correspond, to verifiable facts, empirical data, anything like that. Essentially, you hear people saying, oh, we have his beliefs. So I'm going to believe this. And that I think is not only a shirking of one's intellectual duty, but as a distinctly unmanned hearted thing to do, I like Lewis black, the comedians comment.

You're not entitled to your opinion, who told you that you're entitled to your informed opinion. And again the definition of information needs to be that which corresponds to empirical reality, not something somebody says and you believe because enough people are saying it or the right people are saying it, or it fits with your preexisting framework, et cetera. Same with me. Not something I believe because I want to. So I'm going to kick off the show by defining what I think a Manhearted way of thinking about this is, which is it is Manhearted to face unpleasant facts. I grew up that way facing things that I didn't want to do facing things that were true, that I didn't want to be true. And the adults around me who were reared in the world war II generation, and just after that, and many of my family were military said to me, this is part of what being a man is.

And they meant part of what being an adult is. I just happen to be male, but they were saying that we have to do things and we have to understand things that we don't like to do and understand. I can still remember the time that the sewer backed up and the sink clogged. And my father had to reach his arm, you know, all the way to the shoulder, down into the drain in this muck and try to free it up, et cetera. I said, God, how can you stand to do that? And he says, I can stand to do it because it has to be done. And I'm like, why didn't you get somebody else to do it?

And he's like, why would I do that? You do these things yourself because you know, it's your mess. And so you deal with your mess. If you can, if I couldn't do it, I would get somebody, but because I can do it and it needs doing, I do it well. I think that way about intellect and about ideas, fundamentally, what we think is a mechanical construct. We put together our thoughts, we conjure beliefs, but what we think is something that's constructed out of a relationship with. We have and one of integrity, hopefully to verifiable reality. So facing unpleasant facts is I think part of what it takes to be made right-hearted, but also we have to face facts that don't reaffirm our existing worldview. And I find a lot of people really fall down and we'll miss out on that. Like seriously, if a fact doesn't support the thing they currently support or the person at whose feet they're currently worshiping.

Groveling if the fact does not align with the platform they want to push, then the fat gets discarded. It gets dismissed. And you know, I hear people saying, well, both sides will accuse you each other of that. And the first problem I have is the idea that there's only two sides,