When giants fight
An intellectually humble person reasons objectively and logically. He/she is open-minded, accepts he/she could be wrong, and recognizes his/her sources of knowledge.
Intellectual humility is a virtue protagonists on both sides of the current political divide lack. While they take turns accusing each other of being naïve or stupid, the fact is they both have their share of intellectually arrogant trolls who attack and malign persons instead of rebutting the latter’s argued position logically and objectively.
An intellectually arrogant person blinds him/herself to the truth by not thinking according to strict rules of logic and instead using emotionally-charged preconceived and/or speculative ideas to defend a position. Yet, in spite of this obvious lack of objectivity, he/she insists on being solely right by merely bad-mouthing (an emotionally subjective action) the other person.
Anger not to mention outright hatred that expresses itself in bad-mouthing, name-calling (yellowtards and Dutertetards are intellectually arrogant tags) and rash judging the other person simply because one disagrees is spoiling into premature rottenness what otherwise, with more intellectual humility, would ripen to a cool and productive exchange of logical, objective, and scientific ideas.
In Africa they have a saying that when two elephants fight what suffers most is the grass that gets trampled underfoot. Philippine social elephants, behemoths really, include the administration, opposition parties, the Church, media and a host of others. Nothing in the way they fight over big-ticket items like the Panatag Shoal, Benham Rise, drugs, etc. shows they have in mind the best interests of little people, the grass that is dying underneath them.
Seven-year-old Joshua Andy Durias dies of rabies from a dog-bite.How much less does it cost in official attention and money than it does to fight over our rights to Panatag Shoal and the Benham Rise? How relevant are these to the parents of Andy and of more children who will die senselessly from dog-bites?
A poor community in Tabogon, Cebu just got sanitary toilets. How many more communities would have been provided with those health facilities with the money paid for jet fighters which are of no use anyway in the highly unlikely event of a violent confrontation with China?
How many more poor mothers and their unborn children will die from crude illegal abortions because a religious behemoth (that arrogantly insists on sole possession of the truth) is stopping government from helping them with free reproductive health services?
Indeed when intellectually arrogant social elephants fight, the little people, the helpless grass under their heavy unfeeling feet, suffer the most.