A nifty little expression I first came across here. I thought it was clever, but I didn’t think more of it at the time.

A few weeks later I was listening to a rather entertaining debate on Swedish radio, concerning The Swedish Communist Party (well, they call themselves The Left Party nowadays, but they have some interesting history) and its ties to Cuba, or The Swedish Cuba Association to be more precise. They were discussing democracy in Cuba (one immediately thinks of Chinese Democracy) and the chairman of The Swedish Cuba Association claimed that one of the problems was that Where There Are Three Cubans, There Are Four Opinions.

This ties to another theory of mine, Gravity of Events, but in any case, in a time-space of a few weeks I heard this expression twice. So I fired up google and found out that it is also used for rabbis, who obviously are a sub-group of Jews in general, but also Spaniards had been given this honor. I think it’s safe to assume that even more groups of people have this characteristic.

DejaMorgana later taught me that the version with the rabbis is the original and it concerns the innumerable different interpretations of the Talmud and the best way to fulfill the mitzvoth (commandments). From there it got turned into Jews in general and now it’s apparently used for groups with no apparent Jewish connections (Cubans, Spaniards).
In any case, I like the expression. It describes with beautiful simplicity the problems anyone of us have with agreeing with other people. When two or more reasoning people get together they will each have their own opinion, but also probably have the insight to realize that there might be some truth to the opinions of others. So, to finish up:

Where There Are N People of Some Group, There Are N+1 Opinions.

Disclaimer : Anything concerning Jews is a highly sensitive subject and I would like to make some things clear. I’m not Jewish and I don’t have any particular feelings concerning Jews as a group. The few Jews I have had the pleasure of knowing have all been very decent people. This write-up is not meant to offend or provoke, I simply liked the expression and wanted to explore the subject, i.e. Node what you don’t know.

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