590. There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Opinionated

590.   There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Opinionated

I have been criticized in a derogatory way as someone opinionated.    I am opinionated, because it is my choice and there is nothing wrong with it.  

Opinionated means literally to have an opinion or even more literally to have the trait of being someone with opinions.  Cognitive individuals have an identity and personality, which includes values, attitudes and opinions.  Nobody can be a thinker, mature and an intellectual without having opinions.   

Only instinct driven animals are entirely void of opinions.    To be able to have opinions is a result of the evolution of cognition.   

Becoming more and more opinionated is an automatic side effect of learning and maturing.    While pondering over a variety of topics, over a structured and logical way of putting them into blog entries, I am developing my own opinions.    Thus I am in the process of getting more and more opinionated and I consider this as beneficial.   

There is a real problem, but not at all about having opinions or not, but about how some people develop, acquire or elaborate them or fail to do so.

   

A qualified method to derive opinions includes being informed about all important facts together with the awareness for one's own real needs and inclinations.   This means using logic and reasoning and also introspection.  This includes reconsiderations, whenever new information becomes available.

It is not possible, that everybody can have a qualified opinion about everything.   Rational people are realistically aware, when their access to sufficient information is too limited. 

I dislike and avoid:

• People, who do not to invest time and efforts for thinking and deriving qualified opinions, no matter if they are too stupid, too superficial, too hedonistic, too intellectually lazy or not bothered for any other reason. 
• Gullible people, who are influenced to imitate other people's opinions without any own evaluation, who therefore are unable to explain, why they prefer any specific opinion.   They are also a hazard, when they force unpleasant behavior upon others as a consequence of acting upon imitated opinions.
• Opportunists, who adopt and change opinions according to the prospect of the most benefits, even when they are not aware of this.
• Frauds, who have a goal for which they pretend to have opinions in contradiction to what they genuinely think.

 
I like people, who have qualified opinions and who do not hide them.   Such people can be either easily recognized as mentally attractive by affinity or easily avoided as being aversively different.    

I have no mission to convince anybody of my opinions.  My mindmate to be found is someone, who has developed the same or similar opinions before finding this blog and being attracted by affinities.