cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/22757703, but revised to try to find less individual focused ideas/responses.
In thinking on the classic Sartre quote concerning the folly of arguing with anti-Semites as if they’re arguing in good faith, as well as the Swift quote regarding reasoning being unable to correct an ill opinion one didn’t reason themselves into…
It’s made me wonder if there might be some ways to play off of these approaches to spread beneficial information more than the harmful info they’ve otherwise enabled to abound. What might be some ways to pass along helpful or generally benign info without getting as caught in the weeds explaining things, continuing to allow more harmful info to flourish?
For those unfamiliar, here are the quotes in question:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
And: “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.” ― Jonathan Swift.
(This second one takes on various forms.):::
I tend to think the only way of changing minds is by building community. Most anti-Semites didn’t get that way by knowing a bunch of Jewish people and developing a keen understanding of their culture and customs. They got that way by being alienated and being told by someone with an agenda that their problems were all caused by “the Jews”.
It may not always be easy or correct, but if you want to change someone’s mind, they need to feel like they would benefit from changing their mind, which means they need to feel the social pressures that come with a genuine sense of belonging to a community.
Yeah. A lot of belief is social.
If you say something to someone that threatens their group membership, the brain reacts similarly to how it responds to a physical threat.
So if you tell a Trump supporter “trump is a dangerous bad man”, their brain likely goes down a largely subconscious path of “if I accept this I will be rejected from the group and left to die alone in the woods”. So they have to do a lot of work to avoid that. Facts and truth are less important.
Appealing to another group they also have membership in can work, though. Like you might not get a conservative to recycle by appealing to environmentalism, because that’s an out group thing to them. But you might be able to get it by saying like “only America has the ingenuity to turn trash into treasure like this” or something.
So if you want to get someone out of anti semitism, you need to make them not see that as an important group.
This is why I find a lot of the rhetoric about people with politically incorrect views to be very dangerous. It’s popular nowadays to say that someone with wrong opinions is not just a bad person, but irredeemable, and not deserving of an opportunity to be better. It means that the person in your example knows that they’d not only be rejected from their current group, but that no other group would take them because of their previously held views.