No one likes to think they don't understand something, especially if they're convinced they know something about it. We live in a very complex, dynamic, data-rich environment these days, and it is not always as easy to keep things straight as we might like. We're all busy. Few of us have any real time to ourselves, time to think or reflect or evaluate thoughts and ideas. Compounding the "problem", if you will, is that most everything we base our understanding on comes to us via language, and anyone who has ever seriously dealt with language as an object of study or who has learned, or even tried to learn, a language other than his/her native one knows that language is at best an ambiguous medium of communication.
Our lack of time to serious engage what we hear and read is a huge contributor to the problem of miscommunication and misunderstandings. There is no doubt about that. It is not the only cause. Just as serious is the fact that most people never had the opportunity to learn how to critically engage what they hear and read, and many who got a taste of it think they've mastered it, even though they haven't.
Don't get me wrong. I don't doubt for a second that this latter group is as sincere as anyone else, but we all have to realize that having an opinion should be the result of thought, not the replacement for thought. Thinking about things -- seriously thinking about things -- takes time, energy, skill, and practice.
Every one of us assumes much more about reality than we are ready or willing to admit. For the most part, most people aren't even aware that we start from some very fundamental assumptions. For example, there are those who believe that people are inherently bad (or evil or sinful or cruel or greedy or even some combination of these), others that humans are inherently good (or cooperative or social or kind or loving or perhaps some combination of these). In both cases, however, we are dealing with assumptions. This particular kind of assumption is actually called a pre-supposition; that is, we suppose it is so and hence we don't question its validity, because to us it is simply given that things are thus and so.
Assumptions are neither good nor bad, in general, we all have them and there are simply some things about life that we can't know for sure. The problem is that most of us are unaware of what our fundamental assumptions and pre-suppositions are, and as a result, we are not aware of how much they influence our understanding of what we see, hear, and read. For example, for a person who believes that people are inherently bad, stories of sacrifice and altruism will be met with general skepticism. One might even argue that these people were really doing what they did to gain something for themselves. On the other hand, someone who believes that people are inherently good will "explain" bad things that happen in terms of how abused or mistreated the perpetrator might have been which caused him or her to do whatever heinous deed is in question. What both of these simple situations have in common is that they are not reasoned, they are simply assumed. They are the starting points from which we start to build our understanding of the situations or events involved.
In our hectically paced modern lives, it is certainly difficult to find the time and focus to think about why we believe what we do, but it colors everything we think we understand. It doesn't make understanding more difficult, it only makes it, in the end, less certain.
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