On Open-Mindedness

by Robert Dominic

13 June 2013
Discussed Text: David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water"

It isn't overthinking if we try and analyze if something happens or occurs for a reason, or simply comes about as pure coincidence. In fact, choosing not to exercise this human capability to seek and define the occurrences around us is a dismissal of this capability, and a submission to our default setting of self-centeredness, that if an ordinary thing that occurs does not strike us immediately as intended for us, we assume it simply happened by pure coincidence.

In the matter of open-mindedness and what is morally right or wrong, the basic truth that is self-evident is that we will all look at one thing with different interpretations. That open-mindedness is not meant to establish what is universally and morally right or wrong, because it is not open-mindedness if the aim or goal is to define, and possibly usurp, what is established in our society and in our world as right and wrong. That does not promote the lessening of arrogance that David Foster Wallace sought to highlight in his commencement speech; if open-mindedness deviates from exploring the truths around us and aims to establish what is right and wrong, then open-mindedness becomes a declaration or a claim, not the intended process of choosing how to think and establishing the control and discipline of what truth and point-of-view to observe.