We live in a world of bias. Each of us has our own bias, our own colored version of the world. The Buddhist view here is that our perceptions are flawed and yet we live by those very same perceptions.

When I was a Buddhist, our teacher would ask a question like, “is George Bush good or bad?” People would start answering the question, often in hostility to G. Bush. Then the lama would say, “but how can you say he is ‘bad’? Doesn’t he have followers? What of his family how do they perceive him? What of his pets?”

Where the lama was going was to say that George Bush, like all people or situations, is not self-existing. Meaning, that a person like Bush is a product of our own perception. Sure, Bush exists on his own, but our perceptions color how we view him. We interpret George Bush through a lens and that lens is colored by our karma.

Karma is really our past actions. So if our past actions were in alignment with a conservative viewpoint, we would see George Bush as “good” and if our past actions aligned with being liberal we would see him as being “bad.” But in reality Bush is neither good nor bad, and these labels are simply products of our limited perception.

True understanding, the Buddhist would say, comes from the direct perception of emptiness, where a person would be viewed in their totality – their true essence.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t villains, but that we mustn’t rely only on our perceptions.

Look back on social media and ask yourself, what if these talking heads spent as much time looking for the good in people? How much different would it be if we saw liberal and conservative viewpoints that spent time admiring the good qualities of their opponents, instead of the constant polarization? We might actually get a conversation going for a change.