it’s still worth trying to understand how they see the world.
I am screaming from the rooftops that we need to do this. We need to stop avoiding confrontation and start getting all up in each other’s business again. Leaving people to stew in their atomized world-views is why we have flat earthers and nazis marching around.
The thing is, they’re all just as insecure and scared as you. It’s just like a dog though, in that a dog who’s scared will bark at strangers and bare their fangs. Your racist uncle will say “libtard woke etc etc” and beat his chest and talk about guns and freedom.
But he also wants to not be scared. He also wants to be understood and accepted. He’s just too fucking dumb to get there the same way you did.
You listen. You ask questions. You JUST ask questions, and not because you’re leading towards a huge “GOTCHA” because gotcha’s don’t actually work. They’re self-serving and only make division worse and make your target double down on their insular, atomized world-view.
Instead, you do everything you can to build a personality and history profile of the person by asking them questions about their life, about their fears, about what’s changed in their life, and about what their political leaders have done to help them. Do not get sidetracked, do not get baited. They LOVE to bait you with tangental nonsense, they learned it from FOX. Just repeat yourself “Okay that’s fine, trans people are indeed trying to steal the statue of liberty to send it back to France, but I want to know Jed, what are you going to do if grocery prices don’t go down? What are you going to do if aunt Gertie’s operation isn’t covered?”
A lot of the time, just this act of isolating and highlighting where the biggest concerns are, where the heart of the fear is, that can break people by itself. I have heard it so many times. “I dunno man, I just don’t know… maybe they are all just scummy politicians, I just don’t know who else to believe in.” This is your victory, this is what it sounds like. Not concessions, not regret, not anger or steamed silence. But genuine feelings about something.
This is the way that people like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani focus on issues and change people. It’s focus on one thing, and attacking that one thing and not the person. I know a lot of progressives have a hard time with this because there’s SO MUCH SHIT we want to fix and address, but you have to learn to lower yourself a few pegs and just tackle one thing at a time.
The problem I find is even when I genuinely try to do this their reasoning is genuinely incomprehensible to me, these people don’t care about what they can see with their own eyes let alone scientific concensus, its a world view with more basis on how they feel inside their own heads than whats hitting them in the face in real life.
its a world view with more basis on how they feel inside their own heads than whats hitting them in the face in real life.
Absolutely correct, which is why it’s challenging to engage but also, if you just accept that they live in a world of narratives and feel-stories, you can engage with them on that level, you can make a narrative out of how much they’re paying for childcare, a story of how hard it’s going to be to get a job when wealthy assholes turn over everyone’s [unprotected labor] to AI. You can make a narrative about the rich assholes who are sneaking their tax money out the back door and distracting people with social “identity politics.” You can spin your own conspiracy story, with them at the center of a grand plot.
Except this grand plot is how rich oligarchs are covering up sex crimes and tax evasion among the world’s most elite… wait, that is exactly Q-anon isn’t it? Well that’s why Q-anon worked. It started to almost move people towards realizing they’re being played. Keep that up. Just ground it in reality.
Again, the idea of asking them questions is to get them out of stories about other people in other places. FOX and friends does this on purpose, they spin stories about far-away problems for simple minds to latch onto. Change the story. Make it about them and their home and their savings and their healthcare and their retirement. Bring them back to a present story and peel back their feelings about it.
We have the same basic axioms, it’s just that for some people having an “enemy” makes it easier for them to cope with problems in their own life.
It’s true they thrive in fear, but it’s reductive. We can do a better job changing people and getting better outcomes if we stop being reductive and start being the smarter person who understands how the country’s strongest political capital functions and start getting them pointed towards our actual enemies.
We can do a better job changing people and getting better outcomes if we stop being reductive and start being the smarter person who understands how the country’s strongest political capital functions and start getting them pointed towards our actual enemies
Great comment. And you have to acknowledge that it’s really hard to actually have these conversations. You might actually find out you’re wrong about something because you hadn’t considered something that’s fundamental to their view of the world. And, doing it the way you suggest is even harder than just arguing about it. Because you have to swallow your pride/anger when they talk about stealing the statue of liberty, and instead try to get the conversation back to something more reasonable.
My mom has become a crazy conspiracy theorist, but for most of my life she was a lefty. The result is that she’s not fully right wing, and instead has this weird jumble of beliefs that often clash with each-other. And it’s obvious that a lot of the time she’s just parroting the last thing she heard, without ever having thought about it. I have to admit that often I just dodge it when she brings up her latest conspiracy. It just takes too much energy to engage. Other times I get drawn in and actually just shoot down the ridiculous conspiracy. But, the most productive times are when I can put in the energy and effort to try to understand her underlying fears and why she wants to accept these fantastical stories.
this weird jumble of beliefs that often clash with each-other
Honestly, this is most of the US right now. Maybe much of the world broadly. The information/media age has not been kind to people with simple views and simple minds.
But yes, the huge challenge, and it is a real challenge, is setting aside that need to correct so, so many things that are going to be wrong or utterly batshit and just listen like you’re an alien visiting Earth and you have no idea how anything works so you’re getting it all from this first person you meet.
And this is part of the reason the other commenter is dead wrong.
Most of them know it takes energy to engage, and it takes a lot less out of them to engage in bad faith than it does for you to engage in good faith.
This is valuable effort that could be used to get people who are not active to be active, and instead its wasted on hateful people who aren’t simply “misunderstood” as naive viewpoints would have one believe.
When you talk to people and “figure out” that at a base level they want many of the same things you want, and then are confused at how to bridge the gap, its because the gap is, they only want the good things, if the people they hate can’t also have them. There is no bridge that can be gapped there. They, if trying to be polite/feign ignorance, will talk circles around those underlying views, but you can see in the loud ones and in the messaging of those they support what they are actually for clear as day. They want hierarchy, and they want people they hate below them. This is their single voter issue and its above the shirts on their backs.
This is valuable effort that could be used to get people who are not active to be active
This is not a zero-sum game, you can do fucking both. If you’re too fragile, that’s fine. Don’t. But I will not stand for people on the left saying it’s useless to reach people they don’t agree with, especially since we have minds and brains on our side (usually.)
Not only does this work, I am standing testament to it working. I’m sorry if you’ve had bad experiences but I promise you in real-life conversations you can change people. Like I changed. Like I have changed people. You can’t sit there angrily saying someone is dead-wrong for promoting a proven strategy for reaching people. If there were more people trying to do this, we would be in better shape broadly, but please, if you don’t have it in you, just don’t stand in the way of those who are trying. What are you even hoping to accomplish here other than trying to get recognized for having bad experiences?
This is not a zero-sum game, you can do fucking both.
See, thats the thing. You can’t. People have limited time and bandwidth. Doing something with a burn rate thats 9:1 with its rate of success, vs something with 1:9 makes no sense.
But I will not stand for
Doesn’t sound like you stand for much of anything tbh, so Im not sure this makes a difference.
saying it’s useless to reach people they don’t agree with
That’s not what was said, and you know that. The fact you have to resort to dishonest arguments betrays how weak your position really is.
The people I suggested reaching are still people with who progressives disagree, they just aren’t fuelled by hate.
Not only does this work, I am standing testament to it working.
This is very interesting and telling to me, but not in the way you’re hoping Im guessing.
but I promise you
I can promise you that your promises mean absolutely nothing to me. You’re also arguing against a point that isnt debated.
I promise you in real-life conversations you can change people.
You can, over long periods of time, with tremendously more effort than if you started with people that weren’t already off the deep end and weren’t already so far you lived in different universes.
Peer pressure from having converted the people who didn’t care will do far more work than fruitlessly banging heads against brick walls… racist brick walls at that.
What are you even hoping to accomplish here other than trying to get recognized for having bad experiences?
See, here we have more bad faith from you where you pretend that you being unwilling to engage with my point, means that the only reason I don’t align with you must be because of bad experiences rather than the plain logistics reasons I laid out of work in to result out. It makes no sense to start with the inefficient option.
They know they are awful and don’t want to change. You are wasting your time by going after them instead of people who are much more pliable and simply don’t pay enough attention and go with the flow. Those are the people for whom such a time investment could pay off. Those are the people for whom you would not be wasting your time talking to brick walls who know they speak in bad faith but love wasting your time because they have a locked in goal, and don’t give a shit about how much you want to understand them. Hell, they love it when progressives like you try to stop other progressives from realizing that this is indeed a very straight forward battle of completely different goals and senses of morality.
I am screaming from the rooftops that we need to do this. We need to stop avoiding confrontation and start getting all up in each other’s business again
Time to take a uncooked lentil bean and put it under their valve stem caps and screw it down. The slight depression will slowly leak the air out of their tire, and they will have a ruined day eventually. All without property damage.
I am screaming from the rooftops that we need to do this. We need to stop avoiding confrontation and start getting all up in each other’s business again. Leaving people to stew in their atomized world-views is why we have flat earthers and nazis marching around.
The thing is, they’re all just as insecure and scared as you. It’s just like a dog though, in that a dog who’s scared will bark at strangers and bare their fangs. Your racist uncle will say “libtard woke etc etc” and beat his chest and talk about guns and freedom.
But he also wants to not be scared. He also wants to be understood and accepted. He’s just too fucking dumb to get there the same way you did.
You listen. You ask questions. You JUST ask questions, and not because you’re leading towards a huge “GOTCHA” because gotcha’s don’t actually work. They’re self-serving and only make division worse and make your target double down on their insular, atomized world-view.
Instead, you do everything you can to build a personality and history profile of the person by asking them questions about their life, about their fears, about what’s changed in their life, and about what their political leaders have done to help them. Do not get sidetracked, do not get baited. They LOVE to bait you with tangental nonsense, they learned it from FOX. Just repeat yourself “Okay that’s fine, trans people are indeed trying to steal the statue of liberty to send it back to France, but I want to know Jed, what are you going to do if grocery prices don’t go down? What are you going to do if aunt Gertie’s operation isn’t covered?”
A lot of the time, just this act of isolating and highlighting where the biggest concerns are, where the heart of the fear is, that can break people by itself. I have heard it so many times. “I dunno man, I just don’t know… maybe they are all just scummy politicians, I just don’t know who else to believe in.” This is your victory, this is what it sounds like. Not concessions, not regret, not anger or steamed silence. But genuine feelings about something.
This is the way that people like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani focus on issues and change people. It’s focus on one thing, and attacking that one thing and not the person. I know a lot of progressives have a hard time with this because there’s SO MUCH SHIT we want to fix and address, but you have to learn to lower yourself a few pegs and just tackle one thing at a time.
The problem I find is even when I genuinely try to do this their reasoning is genuinely incomprehensible to me, these people don’t care about what they can see with their own eyes let alone scientific concensus, its a world view with more basis on how they feel inside their own heads than whats hitting them in the face in real life.
Absolutely correct, which is why it’s challenging to engage but also, if you just accept that they live in a world of narratives and feel-stories, you can engage with them on that level, you can make a narrative out of how much they’re paying for childcare, a story of how hard it’s going to be to get a job when wealthy assholes turn over everyone’s [unprotected labor] to AI. You can make a narrative about the rich assholes who are sneaking their tax money out the back door and distracting people with social “identity politics.” You can spin your own conspiracy story, with them at the center of a grand plot.
Except this grand plot is how rich oligarchs are covering up sex crimes and tax evasion among the world’s most elite… wait, that is exactly Q-anon isn’t it? Well that’s why Q-anon worked. It started to almost move people towards realizing they’re being played. Keep that up. Just ground it in reality.
Again, the idea of asking them questions is to get them out of stories about other people in other places. FOX and friends does this on purpose, they spin stories about far-away problems for simple minds to latch onto. Change the story. Make it about them and their home and their savings and their healthcare and their retirement. Bring them back to a present story and peel back their feelings about it.
No. These people live to be fearful. You don’t understand where they are starting from.
We have the same basic axioms, it’s just that for some people having an “enemy” makes it easier for them to cope with problems in their own life.
It’s true they thrive in fear, but it’s reductive. We can do a better job changing people and getting better outcomes if we stop being reductive and start being the smarter person who understands how the country’s strongest political capital functions and start getting them pointed towards our actual enemies.
What would the donors think about this?
Great comment. And you have to acknowledge that it’s really hard to actually have these conversations. You might actually find out you’re wrong about something because you hadn’t considered something that’s fundamental to their view of the world. And, doing it the way you suggest is even harder than just arguing about it. Because you have to swallow your pride/anger when they talk about stealing the statue of liberty, and instead try to get the conversation back to something more reasonable.
My mom has become a crazy conspiracy theorist, but for most of my life she was a lefty. The result is that she’s not fully right wing, and instead has this weird jumble of beliefs that often clash with each-other. And it’s obvious that a lot of the time she’s just parroting the last thing she heard, without ever having thought about it. I have to admit that often I just dodge it when she brings up her latest conspiracy. It just takes too much energy to engage. Other times I get drawn in and actually just shoot down the ridiculous conspiracy. But, the most productive times are when I can put in the energy and effort to try to understand her underlying fears and why she wants to accept these fantastical stories.
Honestly, this is most of the US right now. Maybe much of the world broadly. The information/media age has not been kind to people with simple views and simple minds.
But yes, the huge challenge, and it is a real challenge, is setting aside that need to correct so, so many things that are going to be wrong or utterly batshit and just listen like you’re an alien visiting Earth and you have no idea how anything works so you’re getting it all from this first person you meet.
And this is part of the reason the other commenter is dead wrong.
Most of them know it takes energy to engage, and it takes a lot less out of them to engage in bad faith than it does for you to engage in good faith.
This is valuable effort that could be used to get people who are not active to be active, and instead its wasted on hateful people who aren’t simply “misunderstood” as naive viewpoints would have one believe.
When you talk to people and “figure out” that at a base level they want many of the same things you want, and then are confused at how to bridge the gap, its because the gap is, they only want the good things, if the people they hate can’t also have them. There is no bridge that can be gapped there. They, if trying to be polite/feign ignorance, will talk circles around those underlying views, but you can see in the loud ones and in the messaging of those they support what they are actually for clear as day. They want hierarchy, and they want people they hate below them. This is their single voter issue and its above the shirts on their backs.
This is not a zero-sum game, you can do fucking both. If you’re too fragile, that’s fine. Don’t. But I will not stand for people on the left saying it’s useless to reach people they don’t agree with, especially since we have minds and brains on our side (usually.)
Not only does this work, I am standing testament to it working. I’m sorry if you’ve had bad experiences but I promise you in real-life conversations you can change people. Like I changed. Like I have changed people. You can’t sit there angrily saying someone is dead-wrong for promoting a proven strategy for reaching people. If there were more people trying to do this, we would be in better shape broadly, but please, if you don’t have it in you, just don’t stand in the way of those who are trying. What are you even hoping to accomplish here other than trying to get recognized for having bad experiences?
See, thats the thing. You can’t. People have limited time and bandwidth. Doing something with a burn rate thats 9:1 with its rate of success, vs something with 1:9 makes no sense.
Doesn’t sound like you stand for much of anything tbh, so Im not sure this makes a difference.
That’s not what was said, and you know that. The fact you have to resort to dishonest arguments betrays how weak your position really is.
The people I suggested reaching are still people with who progressives disagree, they just aren’t fuelled by hate.
This is very interesting and telling to me, but not in the way you’re hoping Im guessing.
I can promise you that your promises mean absolutely nothing to me. You’re also arguing against a point that isnt debated.
You can, over long periods of time, with tremendously more effort than if you started with people that weren’t already off the deep end and weren’t already so far you lived in different universes.
Peer pressure from having converted the people who didn’t care will do far more work than fruitlessly banging heads against brick walls… racist brick walls at that.
See, here we have more bad faith from you where you pretend that you being unwilling to engage with my point, means that the only reason I don’t align with you must be because of bad experiences rather than the plain logistics reasons I laid out of work in to result out. It makes no sense to start with the inefficient option.
I disagree with this opinion completely.
They know they are awful and don’t want to change. You are wasting your time by going after them instead of people who are much more pliable and simply don’t pay enough attention and go with the flow. Those are the people for whom such a time investment could pay off. Those are the people for whom you would not be wasting your time talking to brick walls who know they speak in bad faith but love wasting your time because they have a locked in goal, and don’t give a shit about how much you want to understand them. Hell, they love it when progressives like you try to stop other progressives from realizing that this is indeed a very straight forward battle of completely different goals and senses of morality.
Well then I guess our only solution is genocide/mass murder.
What an absurd take.
You have now shot down TWO of my ideas without offering an alternative towards a better future and better things we can do as individuals.
Oh yeah dude,
Is such a legitimate take worthy of proper criticism and attention.
Time to take a uncooked lentil bean and put it under their valve stem caps and screw it down. The slight depression will slowly leak the air out of their tire, and they will have a ruined day eventually. All without property damage.
I love democracy