Difference of Opinion

Personal opinions have become "my lived truth", erasing the value of opinions and eliminating the purpose of facts. Have we wandered apart again for good? Or for bad?

This is my 295th post—five years of showing up here, most Sundays without fail, since the first one dropped on December 30, 2020. Five years of words, reflections, and yes—playlists. Every post since 10/30/21 has had one: songs that felt like the right companion for whatever I was trying to say. Not because I’m a DJ, but because music does what words sometimes can’t—it slips past defenses, finds the quiet spots, and reminds us we’re all just trying to make sense of the same messy world.

I’ve always seen these playlists as little bridges: a way to say, “Hey, even if we see things differently, maybe we can sit with the same song for a few minutes and feel something human together.” That’s the quiet hope behind every dispatch—the sincere attempt to chip away at the ideological walls we’ve built, one shared melody at a time. Not to convert anyone, just to remember that beneath the noise, we’re still capable of listening.

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But when every opinion gets wrapped in therapeutic armor, the armor becomes a shield against scrutiny. “This is my truth” slides effortlessly into “this is the truth,” and anyone who questions it is cast as not just mistaken but cruel.

I wrote “Can We Argue?” a few years ago, mostly as a love letter to the lost art of the clean, detached disagreement—the kind that sharpens both sides without drawing blood. I leaned on Monty Python’s Argument Clinic for laughs, nodded at Burr and Hamilton for gravitas, and ended with a quiet hope that we might still talk to each other like adults.

The piece still circulates now and then. Every so often a new comment pops up, or someone forwards it with “this feels more true every year.” Lately, the notes that land in my inbox have a different temperature. They’re not just nostalgic for better arguments; they’re exhausted by the absence of argument altogether.

One reader wrote: “We don’t argue anymore. We declare, we denounce, we block. The middle ground has been bulldozed.” Another sent a screenshot of a holiday dinner gone sideways the moment politics brushed the table—plates cleared early, doors slammed, relationships left smoldering until next Thanksgiving. A third simply said, “I miss being wrong in public without it feeling like exile.”

Those messages sat with me through December. I watched the usual seasonal rituals: the forced cheer, the careful avoidance of land-mine topics, the performative unity on social media that lasts exactly as long as it takes to scroll past. And I kept coming back to a phrase that’s everywhere now: “my lived truth.”

At first it sounded harmless—almost generous. Who am I to question someone’s experience? But the more I heard it weaponized, the clearer it became that something had shifted under our feet. Opinions stopped being provisional sketches of reality. They hardened into autobiographies. And once an opinion is reclassified as “lived truth,” it becomes sacred, untouchable, beyond the reach of mere evidence.

Facts, meanwhile, got demoted. They went from being the common playing field where ideas could slug it out to being optional props—useful when they confirm, dangerous when they contradict. Disagree with someone’s lived truth and you’re no longer wrong; you’re oppressive. You’re denying their essence.

This isn’t just semantic drift. It’s a tectonic change in how we relate to reality itself.

Let me take a step back and trace how we got here, because the path is instructive—and, most likely, not accidental.

Start with the basic anatomy of an opinion. An opinion is supposed to be a working hypothesis: “Based on what I know, this seems likely.” It invites testing. It expects revision. It leaves the door cracked for better information. That’s why we used to say things like “I could be wrong” or “convince me” without it feeling like weakness.

Facts, by contrast, were the stubborn furniture of the world—things that remained true whether we liked them or not. Gravity doesn’t care about your feelings. Two plus two is four even if it offends your identity. The beauty of the arrangement was that opinions could dance around facts without pretending to be them. You could hold strong views loosely.

That balance held for a long time, more or less. It survived wars, scandals, cultural upheavals. But sometime in the last fifteen or twenty years the ground began to shift.

Social media rewarded certainty over curiosity. Platforms discovered that outrage travels faster than nuance, that identity markers trigger deeper engagement than shared facts. Algorithms learned to feed us content that confirmed rather than challenged. The more certain we sounded, the more we were amplified.

At the same time, a therapeutic vocabulary seeped into public discourse. Language that began in counseling offices—“that’s valid,” “speak your truth,” “honor your feelings”—migrated into politics, media, even corporate life. Those phrases are powerful and necessary in the right context. Trauma is real. Marginalized voices have been silenced for centuries. Listening matters.

But when every opinion gets wrapped in therapeutic armor, the armor becomes a shield against scrutiny. “This is my truth” slides effortlessly into “this is the truth,” and anyone who questions it is cast as not just mistaken but cruel.

Add to that the collapse of trusted institutions. When newspapers, universities, government agencies, and scientific bodies all take credibility hits—some deserved, some exaggerated—people naturally retreat to tribal sources. In the vacuum, personal experience rushes in to fill the role once played by shared evidence.

The result? We now live in a culture where opinions are experienced as identity, identity is experienced as truth, and truth is experienced as personal property.

I’ve watched this play out in small, painful ways.

A friend—smart, kind, genuinely curious—posted a statistic that complicated a popular narrative on social media. Within minutes the replies weren’t engaging the data; they were diagnosing his motives, his privilege, his moral failure. The statistic itself was barely mentioned. The conversation wasn’t about whether the number was accurate; it was about whether he was allowed to say it.

Another acquaintance told me she no longer discusses books with her oldest friends because they’ve each retreated into ideological silos. One reads only authors who confirm her politics; the other dismisses anything outside his. What used to be lively debates about character and theme are now landmines. The books themselves have become secondary to what believing in them signals.

Even in families it’s brutal. I heard from a reader whose adult child declared that differing political views amounted to “harm.” Holiday invitations now come with pre-conditions: no discussion of certain topics, or the relationship itself is at risk. Love, apparently, has terms, boundaries, limits—and an ejection clause to leave.

This is the point where someone usually jumps in with “both sides do it.” And sure—tribalism is human. Left, right, religious, secular, every group has its orthodoxies. But the mechanism I’m describing isn’t symmetrical in its novelty. The elevation of “lived truth” over shared facts is a relatively recent cultural technology, and it’s been adopted with particular fervor in progressive spaces before spreading everywhere else like a meme.

That said, the right has its own versions: conspiracy thinking that treats suspicion as insight, grievance narratives that harden into identity, leaders who demand loyalty over evidence. The forms differ; the flight from testable reality is the common thread.

So what’s lost when opinions become lived truth?

First, the humility that makes learning possible. If being wrong threatens your biography, you’ll avoid it at all costs—even when it means clinging to demonstrable error.

Second, the possibility of genuine persuasion. You can’t change someone’s mind if changing it requires them to rewrite their life story.

Third, the shared world itself. When we each inhabit private realities stitched together from personal experience and algorithmic affirmation, we lose the common ground that makes citizenship, friendship, even family possible.

And fourth—maybe most painfully—the joy of the argument itself. The clean, detached kind. The kind where you walk away respecting the other person more, even if you still disagree. That pleasure is almost extinct in public now.

It’s still worth preserving. So much so, I wrote an open letter addressing it.

There’s a scene I love in the film The Big Kahuna in which Phil speaks to Bob about character, honesty, and regret. The line about putting hands on a conversation to steer it is golden advice that I endeavor to follow.

I think about that when I see yet another online pile-on. We’re all wasting so much time, steering conversations with no idea of character, honesty, or regret.

I’m saying you’ve already done plenty of things to regret. You just don’t know what they are. It’s when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you’ve done and you wish that you had it to do over, but you know you can’t because it’s too late.

None of this is to say personal experience doesn’t matter. Of course it does. Pain is real. Injustice is real. But experience is raw material, not finished architecture. It needs to be interpreted, contextualized, sometimes corrected by wider evidence. The slave narratives were lived truth—and they were also fact-checked, corroborated, and used to change laws. That combination is what gave them power.

Today we’ve inverted the process: experience is granted immediate authority, and wider evidence is treated as suspect if it complicates the story.

I suspect this inversion isn’t entirely organic.

Division is profitable. Outrage is engagement. A population that treats every disagreement as an existential threat is easy to manipulate—by advertisers, by activists, by governments, by algorithms. When facts become optional and opinions become sacred, critical thinking atrophies. And a society that can’t think critically is a society that can be steered.

That’s the cynical read. The optimistic read is simpler: we’re exhausted. Life has been hard. Pandemics, economic anxiety, cultural whiplash. In uncertain times people cling to certainty wherever they can find it—even if that certainty is just the feeling of being right.

Either way, the cost is the same.

So where do we go from here?

I don’t have a grand solution. I’m not going to pretend a Substackistan essay will heal the republic. But I have a few small stubborn habits I’m keeping.

I still say “I could be wrong” out loud. It feels risky every time, like handing someone a loaded gun. But it’s also the only way I know to keep the door open.

I still read and watch things that annoy me, on purpose. Not to dunk on them—dunking is easy—but to see if there’s a shard of insight I’ve missed.

I still argue with friends, the old-fashioned way: over beer, in person, with the understanding that we’ll both probably be a little less certain when we’re done.

And I still write these little dispatches, partly as a record that someone, somewhere, is trying to hold the line between strong opinions and open minds.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Really. Writing into the void is easy; writing to people who actually read and think is a gift.

If you have a real difference of opinion—the kind worth exploring, not the kind that ends in flames—drop it below. Or send it privately. I’ll read it. I’ll think about it. I might even change my mind.

And if I don’t, I hope we can still share a table.

Ric

PS - dont forget the playlist below