You cannot be a writer if you're unable to think like people you don't like

One of the things that happen to you when your beliefs function as a signal of group loyalty rather than as means of trying to estimate truth is that you're unable to think like your enemies. If your beliefs are signals of how much you care about those who agree with you, then whenever you're summarizing opposing views you are doing it not to discover or describe actual reasons that people who disagree with you have for their beliefs, but to show those who belong to your camp how much you hate and despise those who don't. To put it shortly, the reason you're summarizing opposing views is not to describe but vilify them.

One of my favorite (due to its extremity) case studies of this type of thinking is a Polish Catholic publicist and blogger, Tomasz Terlikowski. It's very instructive to read his polemical pieces. He's completely unable to try and figure out why it is that people may disagree with him on ethical matters, and thus unable to faithfully portray beliefs he's attacking. As a result, he's attacking not actually existing beliefs, but ridiculous strawman constructions designed to show how depraved he thinks his enemies are. It's inconceivable to him that any decent, intelligent person could possibly disagree with Catholic ethics, and thus, in his mind, those who do disagree with it must be stupid and/or intentionally destructive. And so in his essays he assumes that pro-choice advocates simply enjoy killing babies, that all that proponents of assisted suicide want is to relieve themselves of the burden of having to care for their old relatives, that people who advocate for gay rights see it mostly as a means of completely destroying society as we know it, etc.

As I said, Terlikowski's essays are instructive as a very extreme case of inability to "put yourself in someone else's shoes." The down side is that they're truly horrible to read: they are an ungodly mixture of bad writing, bad reasoning and breathtaking, hateful arrogance. (Think Phil Donahue but about 15 IQ points stupider and 10 Wild Turkey shots meaner. Or save yourself some trouble and just think of Bill O'Reilly straight away.) What is incredibly entertaining to read, however, is Terlikowski's fiction. He wrote a novel titled "Operation Shroud" ("Operacja Chusta"). The novel isn't entertaining because it's good; on the contrary, it is I think a strong contender for the title of the worst novel ever written in Polish. But as opposed to spectacularly bad essays, spectacularly bad fiction can be fun to read.

Operation Shroud is "theological-fiction." It's set in second half of the 21st Century Europe in which true Catholicism is persecuted by politically correct and ethically nihilist institutions, both state and religious. At any rate, what it's about isn't as interesting as what makes it so bad. One of the major reasons is that Terlikowski's characters are completely ludicrous. Nothing about them feels like real human beings; they are mostly just carriers of different opinions. And, unsurprisingly, Terlikowski's villains are even less of real people than his protagonists. They are nothing more than caricatures. Which makes sense: since Terlikowski cannot conceive of the possibility that a good-natured and intelligent person would have views different than his own, the villains in his book are either complete, drooling idiots or bona-fide, card-carrying psychopaths--hardly an interesting character study material either way. Terlikowski manages to make even those villains that convert to the side of good look uninteresting: there's nothing about their conversion that feels like an actual inner struggle; since the beliefs they've started out with are nothing but vile stupidity, all they need to do in order to discard them is to "open their eyes" and poof, their old evil self is gone, just like that. There's absolutely no reasoning process or emotional struggle behind the conversion; it's just something that happens, like larva turning into a butterfly.

The entire point of my rant is this: you can't be a good writer if you're unable to think like people who aren't you, including people you disagree with, people you don't like, people who don't share your values, people who are capable of doing things you could never do. You don't need to transform into those people; you can still disagree with them, dislike them, despise them or what have you, but you need to be able to understand them. You need to be able to see why they are the way they are and do the things they do. That's the only thing that will make your characters believable. Shakespeare clearly didn't like Edmund's character in King Lear but boy, did he understand him. And so do we. Since Terlikowski doesn't understand people who disagree with him, his fictional characters that he doesn't like are completely incomprehensible.