Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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How To Persuade People in Politics

This post isn’t going to be about persuading people in the conventional political realm. For that, you should ask a politician. This post is about debating political ideas with people, whether in person or on the internet.

The first thing that you should know is that you’re unlikely to get someone to cede their position or their fundamental beliefs in the course of a discussion. People will tend to be less focused on whether or not their position is right and more on how they can show that they have the stronger position. Because they’re focused on that, rather than on figuring out what’s actually true or preferable, you’re unlikely to shift them much in the course of a discussion.

Emotions will also tend to run high in a debate. There are a couple ways to handle it depending on your objectives and the rules of conduct of a given discussion space. You can either be emotionally withdrawn, or you can use passionate expression to bowl over the other person’s position. What your personality is like and what the situation is should direct what method you choose to use.

What you can do is shift the beliefs of other people who might be watching the exchange. And you might be able to indirectly influence the beliefs of the person that you spoke with originally on a longer timeline than the course of a given discussion.

Knowing all this can save you a lot of frustration.

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Words and Images Control Your Mind

Many people, especially smart people, will tell you that they’re not affected by advertisements or what’s in the media. Whether or not they really believe this or are just putting on a strong front must remain a mystery. But the reality is that humans communicate by language, gesture, and picture, and that those messages wind up impacting how those people behave. It’s not so much that  a single article, movie, or radio spot will change someone’s behavior so much as the cumulative effect of all of it together impacts behavior in the aggregate.

So, for example, while a man who sees an ad for Revlon lipstick is not likely to ever go to the pharmacy and buy some Super Lustrous for himself, he may become ever-so-subtly more attracted to women who know how to apply it properly. The women who see it and buy it will then be marginally more likely to net the man they’re looking for, which helps to generate new social norms around wearing makeup.

People in the media are often accused by dissidents of being in the mind control business. This charge is absolutely true. Unfortunately, no method of perfect mind control has yet been developed, despite numerous crash programs and ongoing experiments to that end. The most that can be done, really, is mind-nudging, mind-jostling, which can eventually result in something like fragmentary control over some big part of the average person’s mind.

Knowing this — knowing that what we see changes how we think, and what we think changes how we behave — it behooves us to be much more careful about what we allow ourselves to see, to hear, and to read. Thoughts must precede actions, and misguided or evil thoughts precede evil actions.

So, for example, while it may be useful to read the New York Times to get a sense of what other people believe, reading the Times without a strong mental framework of skepticism will necessarily bring you closer to the viewpoints espoused by the editors at the Times, which is to say, towards champagne communism. Similarly, if you read Zero Hedge every day, you will be pulled in closer to the world of paranoid hedge fund traders who are also probably working for Vladimir Putin. If you read Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, you will be brought in closer to the way of thinking at the State Department and the CIA.

While much of what you read on may not be directly actionable, it does affect how you act, and you should think carefully about what you choose to read & believe if you want to also shape your actions towards your ends.

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Samizdat

The US has a much softer system of repression and censorship than the Soviet Union did, so it’s not right to say that the one is equivalent to the other.

What will happen to you in the US if you tweet the wrong link or cite the wrong article in an approving manner is that the wheels of suppression will start cycling. A large part of the selection process in the university system is to teach people who will wind up in cultural work what the limits of speech are in a professional context.

Many journalists take this process quite seriously — it’s common for professional editors and reporters to send incensed e-mails to staffers at alma mater newspapers when a young person leaves the reservation. Universities tend to be crystal clear about what forms of speech are permitted, and which are forbidden, with new restrictions upon the lexicon appearing each year.

“Social media” has made almost everyone into a publisher, but it has also helped to make everyone a potential censor. The legal penalties may be ad hoc and largely indirect, but volunteer censors can use the threat of the enforcement certain laws to gain some real power over even powerful and influential people who begin to cross some important lines.

Despite this, many in conventional, censored publishing have expressed worry about the loss of authority which they have experienced. People seem to not read what they used to, and seem to trust what they read less, which is backed up by surveys.

According to Gallup, only 27% of Republicans trust the media — and rightly so, because the media, along with the professoriat, is overwhelmingly hostile to conservative ideas, conservative political parties, and the culture of conservative people.

What do these people tend to turn to instead? They turn to other sources, which have to be passed from person to person, bypassing the semi-official organs of censorship. It’s easy to get some editor or reporter fired, but it’s a pain in the ass to go after people who might not even be based in the same country, but can still publish essentially seditious and subversive material which undermines the ability of the state to enforce its will without opposition.

Hoping to convince the semi-official organs of censorship to stop doing their jobs, which is to censor, is stupid — if the goal is to shift the political order further to the right. That goal can be better accomplished by just speaking to the people directly, which would be possible even with primitive technology, but is even easier with advanced technology, and just continuing that to re-organize the populace out from under the hostile Brezhnev-type bureaucratic order.

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