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A Passing Thought

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Most people who disagree on an issue, actually agree about the issue at some deeper level. An example would be: Jane says to be healthy one should adopt diet X, and John says to be healthy one should adopt diet Y.

Now, consider an example with more "end-means" steps. Suppose Jane and John both agree one should be healthy. Also, suppose both mistakenly believe that the essence of a good diet is to cut down fiber content and raise fats (form now, let's assume this is mistaken). Now, Jane thinks that diet X is the best low-fiber high-fat diet, while John thinks diet Y will do the trick. As each imposes their diet on the other, and both continue to grow fat, they would each accuse the other of choosing a diet that is unhealthy.

I'm not sure which accusations you;re referring when it comes to the political parties. However, if you analyze how they each are basing their arguments -- if you construct their "ends-means" sequences -- you will find that they agree at some level. It would therefore be logical for them to accuse the other of not achieving the same thing: because, at some level of "peel-back" , they agree.

This is an extremely common pattern. One might actually say it is the norm in most controversies.

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They are so close in ideology that they feel the need to demonize the other side, in order to appear as though there is some difference. This usually takes the form of social controversies, because there types of arguements are emotionally stimulating, and easier to manipulate at a visceral level.

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Like I said, this is/was a passing thought at a late hour in the morning, so I didn't dig up a bunch of sources. It's just one of those casual thoughts I was wonder if anyone else would identify with.

One big example is with the Nazi's. These people call each other Nazi's all the time, I'm pretty for sure it's gotten to the point where it's no longer about who the Nazi's were or what they did. Nazi has just become a synonym for evil, bad, not political direction to go in, etc....

I don't want to equate them, but I just wonder why so many people worried about the exact same thing would disagree so much.

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