Let's say you are in the military. You are dropped off in a location and given a map of the drop zone and surrounding area. You parachute down from the plane, survey the area when you land, and you find the map does not match the area at all. What do you do? Is the terrain wrong or your map? This is a rhetorical questions of course. The map is clearly wrong. So what do you do?

Do you look for high ground to enable you a better perspective to place yourself on the map? How long to you spend evaluating the map before you give up on it? If you give up on the map, how do you navigate?

This hypothetical likely induces fear and confusion. The unknown typically induces these emotions. One can condition themselves or be trained to deal with how best to deal with the unknown. A key way to deal with this is to have a methodology for building sound mental models.

A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about his or her own acts and their consequences.

The key to building accurate mental models is to live by this motto,

"The more willing you are to be wrong, the more right you will be."

This is a pity way of describing the emotional state required for progress.

Your ego must not be so fragile, nor your faith in any worldview must not be so strong, that they prohibit you from finding a better way to understand the world around you.

Sadly, for most people most of the time, they would rather preserve their ego or their worldview than to challenge it or learn a new and better way. They self censor and halt their own progress. The desire to not change is so strong that religions and political institutions are formed to buttress a group's worldview, to protect it from external realities.

In the map example above, it is not hard, given human psychology (and history) to imagine a soldier having great faith in the map the the military institution that provided it to creatively imagine ways of interpreting the map to match the surroundings. Such a mental exercise may be emotionally satisfying but it would not help his situation.

If a person's or a group's mental models are wrong, this does not necessary create an ethical issue. Having an invisible friend is not harmful to others, and it may be helpful to the person with the invisible friend. If a person's or group's mental models causes them to act in a manner harmful to others, then an ethical situation has formed.

It is for this reason that one's religious views and political views matter in an ethical sense. Religions' claim to having knowledge of things they cannot prove and they hold onto notions that are easily proven wrong. Political parties claim to be able to predict with certainty the results of the pure application of their methodologies to complex systems; even when close approximations of their idea have been tried and failed miserably. Both institutions seek to spread their group size, influence, and power and they use powerful memes (i.e. "stick ideas") to spread. These institutions are not concerned with truth, they are concerned with power.

Ethical understanding is key to dissolving the power of wrong ideas. Whether they be from individuals, religious, political, or any other institutions. Ethical understanding starts with introspection, "How would I like it if that was done to me?" Introspection is all about questioning yourself, your own worldviews. Getting comfortable with that will increase your wisdom, not just with ethical understanding, but with building more accurate mental models of the world. Ethical understanding ought to be the foundation from which all knowledge and institutions are built.