The hallmarks of a good politician today are someone who “isn’t afraid to tell it like it is,” “sticks to their values,” or, in more up-to-date vernacular, is “for f*&#ing real.” Flip-flopping is a death sentence. It’s so easy to identify someone’s inconsistencies in an age of infinite data collection and a digital log that begins, frankly, before you’re born, with a Facebook post of a blurry ultrasound. Holding those in power accountable is certainly a noble endeavor, but at what point does authenticity become stubbornness, genuine personality bullheadedness, and conviction merely an unwillingness to evolve?

We must be allowed—perhaps are even morally obligated—to adjust our opinions and beliefs as our lived experiences grow and change. If I was in one political party my whole life but began to read and research politics more, began to speak with more experts, and began to listen to personal experiences different from my own, shall I be a pariah for sympathizing with another? (Overhaul of beliefs is not always the aim, of course, but adjustments on a policy position or development of sympathy for other values are often vilified, too.) Rapidly evolving societal, political, economic, technological contexts mean we’re exposed, every day, to a wealth, an overabundance, of new information; how can it be just to keep our entire belief system the same if we are challenged on it daily by new facts and new experiences?

It is not a new or particularly interesting take to state that as the world globalizes and each of us are exposed to more and more types of people that don’t follow our personal concepts of normal and weird, comfortable and uncomfortable, moral and immoral, we will, inescapably, run into conflict on the largest and smallest of scales.

What is perhaps more controversial is the belief that we must find a way to constructively and effectively not only coexist but coordinate with one another such that each of us feels, at the very least, unbreached by another. The aim is not to proselytize in any political or social direction; the aim is to allow for each individual to believe in what they may wish to believe and live how they wish to live so long as those beliefs and those lives do not result in the infringement of others’ lives.

Easy to say, of course, and much harder to do.

This is why I believe the Program for Public Discourse (PPD) and similar civil discourse initiatives across the country are so essential; they provide the practical skills necessary for the cultivation of beliefs that could satisfy such a vision. Polarization and animosity—and even its adverse health effects—are shown to improve with the development of “bridging social capital” through meaningful dialogue. The exposure to social groups and those with “othered” characteristics that responsible discourse requires and the skills that the Agora Fellowship and the PPD promote combine to create a powerful and effective method of adjusting mindset and belief, focused not on the demonization of difference but rather simple recognition and acceptance.