I was rewatching the other day this eighties movie, Crocodile Dundee. In it, there are two main characters, a man and a woman. The man is from the countryside; the woman, from the city. At one point in the film, check out the conversation they have:
SHE: What do you think about the arms race? HE: Not of my business... SHE: Not of your business! How can you say that? It's everybody's business. Gotta have an opinion, gotta have a voice...
So, to have an opinion sounds like something trendy coming from the mouth of the attractive, succesful urban woman of the movie: you MUST HAVE an opinion. If you don’t, that’s baaad.
Must-haves
Hmmmm… part of me has always hated must-haves. They sound like a commercial where they’re creating an artificial need and turning it into a natural need in order to keep the cash flowing. And the worst of it is that, eventually, usually everyone takes it as a real need when it really isn’t; at least it wasn’t when I woke up this morning five years ago, huh?
But you can’t stop that, right? That’s evolution! We all know someone that has resisted to have a cell phone for a similar reason. And, although respectful and even admirable, it doesn’t seem a good decision not to have a cell phone these days. That’s evolution, isn’t it? Take it or fall behind…
When it comes to concepts, ideas, knowledge, do the same rules as with technology apply to the must-haves? Why must I have an opinion? Well, for the same reason you don’t go to a concert without trousers (at least if you are not part of the band who’s performing :). But is that the only reason? I mean, is it all just about that: to superficially comply with the fashion of the times? For some people, that’s more than enough. On the other hand, if that’s not enough for you, you’ll agree that it’s impossible to reach the depths of anything without starting in shallow waters, right?
The forge of an opinion
I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
Ingmar Bergman
What is an opinion? At what time an opinion becomes knowledge? And when knowledge becomes knowledge? Is it when academia says so? How many times knowledge has been replaced by a most accurate knowledge?
An opinion, in the best case, is just the seed of a longing. If that longing is the longing for knowledge, the longing for truth, that’s probably as good as it gets.
Exercise
Take whatever topic you want. For instance, JavaScript: is it an interpreted or a compiled language? The first reasonable answer when you meet this topic is, of course, Not of my business. But imagine it becomes our business somehow, and we must have an opinion about it. Even if it’s only not to look stupid while having a coffee at the office.
You could go to Wikipedia, read about it, memorize it and repeat it like a parrot. Or you could even be less ambitious, just take a sentence or two out of a colleagues’ conversation you heard, and reason: if he says so, he must be right. In both of these cases, be honest to yourself: even if you were right you wouldn’t really know about it in your guts.
If you are serious about it, though, you could check out some blogs, browse on Stack Overflow, read some JS articles and/or books, complement it watching some tutorials on Youtube… today we have so many resources at our disposal!
Thus, you could reach a point in which you would be prepared to say something like this: JavaScript started just being an interpreted language in the nineties and, nowadays, it is both interpreted and compiled, as Koushik Kothagal explains in a very digestible way here.
So finally we would have fulfilled our desire: we already have our opinion. Or, could we say, knowledge?
Know your opinions, ‘opinionate’ your knowledge
I’ve always been of the opinion (ha ha) that the most important thing is not to reach the ultimate answer, but to keep asking good questions to yourself. Sometimes it’s inevitable to reach a temporary conclusion. We must make decisions. We must live. But don’t lie to yourself: it almost always seems premature to call anything a conclusion; applying here the Open-closed principle pattern (be open for extension but closed for modification) would be dangerous and out of context. With opinions and knowledge it would be more humble and realistic to apply some kind of an Open-Open attitude… I heard the other day the perfect summary for this point of view:
Aspire to be less wrong
Elon Musk
To wrap it up: unwrap it
Curiously enough, this movie, Crocodile Dundee, was filmed in 1986, when the World Wide Web hadn’t been born yet. So, at that time, I suppose it was easier not to have an opinion. It wasn’t so shocking as it is today to hear ‘not of my business’. Nowadays, with the Internet, it seems truer than ever that you must hold an opinion for everything. Paradoxically, it’s never been so difficult to forge an opinion. At least with some topics as political ones like the arms race that wasn’t Crocodile Dundee’s business. Now there is so many data and opinions about everything…
If I had to give my opinion, this would be the following: it’s perfectly fine answering not of my business. At least it’s an accurate and honest opinion. A very different thing would be to have a helpful or enriching opinion about something and keeping it to yourself out of fear or laziness. In the past that has been the road for a society to become misinformed and eventually brutalized.
The only common business we humans have is the possibility of listening to others and discovering that yes, perhaps it is our business. If one has enough passion, the environment usually mirrors that enthusiasm somehow. But one thing is true: a voice can be listened by lots of ears, but many voices can’t be listened to at the same time. So train your ears, hone your skills of listening and filtering in and out the good sources, ‘cuz time is short, man!
It’s not about talking: it’s about having the possibility to talk about it
It’s not mandatory to talk about anything (nor is it advisable for the sake of our ears). So, to recap, I would say that more than gotta have a voice, the point is in gotta have an ear; more than gotta have an opinion, you must train yourself to think; more than training yourself to give the right answer, train yourself to ask the right questions, digesting the responses you get to those questions. And maybe, with time, your voice will be developed enough to be listened to. And, even if it isn’t, you could always depeche toi and enjoy the silence, the greatest opinion of them all.
