Captain America, Winter Soldier and misinformation.

Some ideas about misinformation, tolerance and how can we work effectively together.

Shot from Captain America Winter Solider (at 37:28)

Intro if you don’t know Captain America

This introduction is needed if you didn’t watch Captain America Winter Soldier, you can jump to “What is happening now?” if you don’t need this intro.

Bucky is Captain America’s friend, who is supposed to be dead in “The first avenger.” The evil organization “Hydra” retrieved Bucky and turned him into Super Soldier, which then programmed (Hacking Bucky’s brain) to kill Hydra’s enemies.

In the movie, Captain America didn’t give up the Winter Soldier; he gave his friend a chance, and Captain America was right, Bucky’s brain was hacked, and he needed help.

What is happening now?

In the last five years, we have been living an awkwardly interesting times; we have seen what happens when politicians and leaders talk to their people in a manipulative and misleading way through talking to their emotions.

It is scary to see that you can take over someone’s rational brain by playing the words and change the tone; such a tool is terrible as it has so much power over people, the number of biases that we fall into is enormous, and it takes a lot of effort to keep those biases on a check.

The dream of harmonious society

For some reason, I think the solution is easy, we need small number of tolerant people, and we need to trust those highly tolerant people.

Now, Why we are talking about Captain American and Winter Soldier

I love Superhero movies, and my favorite is Captain America; Usually, people like a scene or part of a film, but with this one, I like his relationship with his friend Bucky.

He trusted his friend and believes in him, and that shows clearly in “Civil war.”, but why am I talking about misinformation in this context, the way I see it is; Someone is incapable of deciding with full autonomy.

Maybe the connection between the misinformed person and Winter soldier is far, but we are not about this side of the story; we are here to talk about the other side, Captain America’s behavior toward Bucky.

To save your time, the point here is we should trust that the people we disagree with are not out to get us; it is disagreement. Sometimes Emotions and harmful misinformation fuel this disagreement. If we take Captain America’s way by having enough compassion to defend those we disagree with, things might be different. It is working together slowly to understand what is going on, make sure that the information we have is symmetric and there are no assumptions.

Switching gears to Hamlet (The movie), I love one quote there.

“We live in paralyse times, were right & wrong, good & evil meet each night fail to recognize each other to what they are.”-Ophelia.

I see this quote as a representation of the number of shades of gray we have in life; imagine whatever your definition of right and wrong is at some point with complicated enough situation you can’t tell what is right and what is wrong, not for the lack of understanding or information, it is just too complex to figure it out.

Now to the blender, Taking Captain America’s way and Ophelia understanding of a complicated situation and I think we can conclude “Slow down, share what you know, and don’t assume malice”, each and everyone we meet every day has the motive to do what they are doing, with enough empathy and understanding of where are they coming from we may reach to a common ground where our combined intellectual and mental abilities take us to new places the planet never had a chance to get without such unity.

In my culture, we say, “Be careful but don’t assume malice” A.K.A “Trust but verify.” I believe most people aren’t evil by nature, but some people find their way in being evil, then it becomes who they are.

Visualizing the thought

The assumption is each person has 3 circles.

Introducing “Tolerance Graph”

Here I will explain the ideas of highly tolerant people and their role in getting us together.

Assume that we have a group of people with different ideas, tolerance is how we accept each other, and we see that there are different shades to life than the one we believe in.

Do we need everyone to be highly tolerant? I think no, we don’t need everyone to be tolerant, but we need to have enough tolerant people that intolerant people trust.

Imagine every color, is an idea in someone’s head, the rings around it, is how much the person hold this idea open for opposing idea.

With enough tolerant people, all ideas will be communicated, and the intensity of disagreements will not reach the conflict level.

Having more tolerant people in socaity work as a glue for everyone, it is the bridge that gets ideas across people.

I hope that I was able to communicate my idea clearly and wish if we start a conversation, any conversation that you tell me more about your ideas.