A rigid inflexibility of mind. A lack of receptiveness to fresh ideas.

A tendency to fall back on tried-and- failed beliefs regardless of new circumstances or information.

As US President John F Kennedy once said, we often tend to subject all facts which come our way to a prefabricated set of interpretations and so enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of actual thought.

From time to time we are all guilty, individually and collectively, of defaulting to what have become our habitual mental fallback positions, regardless of their limited logic or utility.

And most of us eventually learn the unhappy consequences of doing so. We become trapped in a kind of Groundhog Day scenario, drawing the same wrong-headed conclusions over and over again. We learn nothing. We do nothing to open stubbornly shuttered minds.

We achieve nothing in terms of better comprehending and contending with the problems we face in the world around us.

It’s difficult to make a clean break with patterns of thought which may have become comfortable but are entirely counterproductive — difficult but frequently necessary.

Our stumbling reaction to the disruptions of recent years provides a case very much in point.

Almost everything about Bermuda has changed since the unsustainable development of the late 1990s and early 21st century gave way to an equally jarring economic contraction which got underway in 2008 and is only now bottoming out. Almost everything, that is, except an obstinate Bermudian mindset.

The fact is many of the old cast-iron certainties about our Island and ourselves simply no longer apply; the number of fixed cultural and socio-economic reference points by which we used to define ourselves and our community have largely gone the way of the Cahow and the Bermuda Skink.

Over-employment, which once provided a standard of living the world envied, has given way to widespread unemployment and all manner of associated social ills.

The population continues to shrink because of a massive exodus of foreign workers, the ongoing emigration of Bermudians in search of brighter prospects and a falling birth rate; this is creating both a local brain drain — the Bermudians packing their bags tend to be among those we can least afford to lose — and further weakening an already destabilised economy.

And while new jobs are certainly being created in a fits-and-starts manner, the reality is that old ones continue to be shed at a dispiriting rate and fresh corporate and infrastructure investment in Bermuda is barely sufficient to keep the economy from stalling altogether.

Meanwhile the era of healthy Government surpluses is now as much a fading memory as such half-remembered Bermuda idiosyncrasies as the five o’clock siren and the Thursday half-day.

Bermuda’s credit facility is stretched to the absolute breaking point as we attempt to maintain a disproportionately large public sector, a situation which will only lead to increased deficits, debts and future financial instability.

Yet even in the face of these hugely complex, almost elemental forces battering the Bermudian landscape, too many of us persist in viewing the Island and its affairs through the polarised glasses of the Westminster two-party political system.

Everything is distilled down to a my-party-right-or-wrong formulation rather than being about the quest to find the right solutions to the problems we must deal with as matters of urgency. In Bermudian politics it’s Groundhog Day every day.

The constitutional arrangements the British foisted on Bermuda and other current and former territories when they were hurriedly liquidating their empire-building business in the 1950s and ‘60s have ensured the normal tensions and differences of opinion found in any biracial community instantly become politicised, institutionalised and effectively dogmatised, largely along ethnic lines.

Politics is reduced to a simplistic (simple-minded even) form of bloodless tribal warfare instead of providing a mechanism for all of us to work together for the common good.

The resourcefulness, pragmatism and adaptability which Bermudians from all walks of life have repeatedly demonstrated in the face of past adversity simply cannot function in such an environment.

For those who attempt to force events to conform to one dogmatically inflexible interpretation or another are doomed never to actually understand the issues they are contending with, let alone resolve them.

Such absolutist mindsets are troubling for another reason as well. Because to be absolutely convinced your own position is right is, by definition, to be absolutely convinced everyone else’s is wrong.

There can be no compromise, no consensus, no conciliation. And absolutely no progress. Bermuda is still struggling with the worst and most protracted national crisis in its modern history.

Yet neither political party has uttered so much as a single word about the possibility of forming a national government, a coalition which would allow for a common approach to our many common problems. Rather both parties remain wedded to the concept of politics as a vehicle for the sole acquisition and consolidation of power, a means to rule by relentlessly dividing and redividing Bermudians.

And events of recent weeks have demonstrated just how destabilised the community can become when such divisions are continuously exacerbated for short-term political gain.

Clearly the time has come for political leaders on both sides of the Parliamentary aisle to subject themselves to the discomfort of a little actual thought because Bermuda and Bermudians can no longer afford to indulge the alternative.