The modern red-hat wearer would probably use terms like woke, libtard, communist, etc.
But, I would bet that if this same kind of confrontation happened a quarter century ago, the conservatives might be saying “He’s super irrational and emotional”. Like, I think conservatives believe that they see the world as it is, and that liberals are blind to the realities of life. They believe that liberals want to change the world, but don’t understand that it is the way it is for a good reason.
It’s similar to how when women were campaigning for the right to vote, men who didn’t support hat would say things like “I love my wife, but she’s a woman so she’s not capable of making the hard choices.” Or, “My mother is a wonderful person, and full of love, but her emotion clouds her judgment.” Or, “I love my daughter, but she’s too unstable, she jumps on any new trend, running a country requires a steady hand.”
Yes, the reality is that the racist uncle is super racist. But, it’s still worth trying to understand how they see the world. If for no other reason than it’s easier to defeat your enemy if you understand them.
Are you suggesting that Liberals aren’t blind to the realities of life cause literally everyone I’ve talked to on the Left is convinced they are. If both Left and Right thinks Liberals are blind to reality shrug
The irony is that conservatives think they are “rational” and left leaning people are “emotional”. Like no, almost none of your positions are backed by research and data to be good. Conservatives think higher education is a liberal conspiracy so it’s not surprising.
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.
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.
It’s easy to forget that no one is the villain in their own book. While the views might be now outdated, taking a moment to consider the other person’s perspective, even if it doesn’t align with my own, can really help with reaching a common understanding. There’s a drastic change when you see your ultra racist uncle as a man that’s simply absolutely frightened of change, and that is something I can get on with. Empathy goes a long way.
It’s easy to forget that no one is the villain in their own book.
Incidentally, why I hate a lot of movies where the villain is Dr. Evil who is part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or something. Also why I think the Good / Evil alignment axis in D&D is bullshit.
ultra racist uncle as a man that’s simply absolutely frightened of change
Or just someone who grew up in a different time and was taught different things and doesn’t believe that what they were taught is out of date. Similarly, a kid might think they know everything but doesn’t have the wisdom and experience to know that things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. Both can be pretty obnoxious at a thanksgiving dinner table.
Take, for example, a discussion about how voting is done. The racist uncle might think that mail-in voting is a scam, and that the only way to vote should be in-person. He might not understand that poor people in cities sometimes have to wait in line for hours to vote, and that some might not be able to do that while holding down 2 jobs. He might not believe that the small number of polling places was a deliberate choice by a past government to discourage these people from voting.
But, at the same time, the kid might think that online voting is the obvious answer. The kid lives her entire life online and often votes on things. She knows a bit about encryption and has heard of blockchains and thinks that the only people against online voting are luddites who are afraid of technology. She might not understand the danger of being able to prove that you voted and who you voted for. She might not appreciate how sometimes low tech things are much harder to manipulate and fake.
So, there’s “cautious of change happening too quickly” vs. “too eager to embrace change without considering the consequences”. Everybody likes to think that they’re smack dab in the sweet spot between those two things, but everyone else is going to judge them as being too far to one side.
I am literally wrapping up a novel where the protagonist is the antagonist at the same time. I’m not the first one to write such a story of course, but holy shit did I have to work through some internal trauma to write that story to a suitable ending. I understand why many people may not want to bother…
That sounds very cool! I’d be very interested in reading it, whenever it’s available. Specially knowing that it involved some soul searching from the author.
The modern red-hat wearer would probably use terms like woke, libtard, communist, etc.
But, I would bet that if this same kind of confrontation happened a quarter century ago, the conservatives might be saying “He’s super irrational and emotional”. Like, I think conservatives believe that they see the world as it is, and that liberals are blind to the realities of life. They believe that liberals want to change the world, but don’t understand that it is the way it is for a good reason.
It’s similar to how when women were campaigning for the right to vote, men who didn’t support hat would say things like “I love my wife, but she’s a woman so she’s not capable of making the hard choices.” Or, “My mother is a wonderful person, and full of love, but her emotion clouds her judgment.” Or, “I love my daughter, but she’s too unstable, she jumps on any new trend, running a country requires a steady hand.”
Yes, the reality is that the racist uncle is super racist. But, it’s still worth trying to understand how they see the world. If for no other reason than it’s easier to defeat your enemy if you understand them.
Are you suggesting that Liberals aren’t blind to the realities of life cause literally everyone I’ve talked to on the Left is convinced they are. If both Left and Right thinks Liberals are blind to reality shrug
The irony is that conservatives think they are “rational” and left leaning people are “emotional”. Like no, almost none of your positions are backed by research and data to be good. Conservatives think higher education is a liberal conspiracy so it’s not surprising.
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.
No. These people live to be fearful. You don’t understand where they are starting from.
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.
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.
It’s easy to forget that no one is the villain in their own book. While the views might be now outdated, taking a moment to consider the other person’s perspective, even if it doesn’t align with my own, can really help with reaching a common understanding. There’s a drastic change when you see your ultra racist uncle as a man that’s simply absolutely frightened of change, and that is something I can get on with. Empathy goes a long way.
Incidentally, why I hate a lot of movies where the villain is Dr. Evil who is part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or something. Also why I think the Good / Evil alignment axis in D&D is bullshit.
Or just someone who grew up in a different time and was taught different things and doesn’t believe that what they were taught is out of date. Similarly, a kid might think they know everything but doesn’t have the wisdom and experience to know that things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. Both can be pretty obnoxious at a thanksgiving dinner table.
Take, for example, a discussion about how voting is done. The racist uncle might think that mail-in voting is a scam, and that the only way to vote should be in-person. He might not understand that poor people in cities sometimes have to wait in line for hours to vote, and that some might not be able to do that while holding down 2 jobs. He might not believe that the small number of polling places was a deliberate choice by a past government to discourage these people from voting.
But, at the same time, the kid might think that online voting is the obvious answer. The kid lives her entire life online and often votes on things. She knows a bit about encryption and has heard of blockchains and thinks that the only people against online voting are luddites who are afraid of technology. She might not understand the danger of being able to prove that you voted and who you voted for. She might not appreciate how sometimes low tech things are much harder to manipulate and fake.
So, there’s “cautious of change happening too quickly” vs. “too eager to embrace change without considering the consequences”. Everybody likes to think that they’re smack dab in the sweet spot between those two things, but everyone else is going to judge them as being too far to one side.
I am literally wrapping up a novel where the protagonist is the antagonist at the same time. I’m not the first one to write such a story of course, but holy shit did I have to work through some internal trauma to write that story to a suitable ending. I understand why many people may not want to bother…
That sounds very cool! I’d be very interested in reading it, whenever it’s available. Specially knowing that it involved some soul searching from the author.