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.):::
Since you like quotes so much, here’s another one:
Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
- Mark Twain
How about:
Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
I seem to recall one about not wrestling a pig because you both get covered in shit, but the pig likes it. Can’t remember the exact quote though.
Edit to replace with canonical link: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/08/pig/
Tbh I’m not a big fan of quotes, but those two captured what I wanted to prod at that I felt them useful. Also yours is pretty much exactly why I’m asking this. It’s a waste to argue, so what might be alternatives to change people’s minds and spread good info?
Perhaps free food and beer and some good babble?
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.
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.
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.
What I’ve been doing lately is using conspiritorial logic to push my narrative. Who knows if it’s actually working but when you start to think about it you start noticing patterns and things…
A wise man told me don’t argue with fools
'Cause people from a distance can’t tell who is who- Jay-Z
You really can’t, because the idiots will all suddenly become experts on logical fallacy the red second you try to beat them at their own game
Make a worm to patch vulnerable computers
Chaotic good
Shitpost on Truth Social
Pretty sure truth social is really just a data harvesting platform to benefit the right wing manipulation groups like the kochtopus because data can be purchased from truth social which can be used by them
You don’t. The methods are the differentiating factor between good and bad. The problem is you can be mistaken about what’s right and wrong, so to be good you have to keep open lines of communication. Those open lines of communication aren’t just like phone lines and relationships, but also certain patterns of communicating.
If you do the bad faith stuff, if you’re manipulative and you lie to paint the picture you want people to see, then you ruin the mechanism that keeps you and everyone else good.
The ends do not justify the means.
The moral high ground is why Democrats keep giving ground.
Stack the courts. Change laws to prevent it from happening again. Take advantage then close the door. Gerrymander for the left, then fix the process.
You need to use all the tools at your disposal to win. If you don’t like using some of those tools, win then break the tools.
It’s kind of interesting that yours is the first reply in this vein that I’ve seen so far. I honestly expected more.
I think though that there’s possibly more of a gray to this, which is why I was asking. Think somewhere in the space of white lies, benign comments that aren’t as forthcoming as some might prefer, but they often serve to make someone feel a little better, and who knows, maybe that feeling better helps lift their self-esteem enough to improve themselves so that the white lies fall away to be honest compliments or comments.
The answer to whatever question you’re trying to ask is by not really arguing with them but by engaging in a way that makes their presentation worth less than the cost of their investment.
