How To Get Nothing Out Of Political/Social Discussions
Are you one of those people that gets really frustrated during political discussions? I am! It made me think about how I could escape this seemingly never ending cycle of mild, to severe, annoyance. As a result I drafted these common mistakes I made or observed in others, which led to no one getting anything out of the discussions.
This isn’t the “Holy Grail”, nor exclusive, these are just some ideas that you might find useful.
1. Being horrible
The dawn of the internet age has given people a platform to say the most horrendous things, under the cover of anonymity, or just because the internet seems to lower peoples inhibitions and remove all traces of common decency.
Being horrible isn’t just a bad idea because it’s a unproductive and unnecessary thing to do, but it also actually hinders truth and engagement. Think about if someone says to you: “you are a nasty, dirty moron with no brain, and I hope you die” (and this is pretty mild for the internet). Are you likely to listen to what the person is actually saying? She/He could be telling you something that is 100% correct, factual and truthful, but human nature will cause you to ignore that person and not accept what he is saying.
The same is true for you. If you are mean, condescending and demeaning when you talk about politics, then it’s highly unlikely that anyone will actually listen to you, or take you seriously. You could be the most intelligent person in the world but you aren’t going to achieve anything useful if you treat people like dirt. This includes stooping to others level. It doesn’t matter who started it. Just don’t be horrible!
2. Not listening
Another common element in political discussions is people not actually listening to each other. A person says one thing, the listener hears another thing, and then responds with something completely different, and in 2 minutes they’re now talking about different things, and both starting to get frustrated.
Nowhere is a better example of this than Twitter. Someone will post a link and the majority of people will respond without even reading it, and they will then respond with something completely off topic or out of whack with the original post. It’s such an enormous waste of time when you think about it. I would wager that about 50% of discussions on Twitter are people talking across purposes. Think about how much time that is wasting. It’s actually a bit laughable.
The easy solution is to really take the time to read and understand the things that people are expressing. No one else might be doing it, but that’s not an excuse to join the party.
3. Holding on to Opinions
It seems like people have opinions on everything these days. I bet that everyone reading this has heard the statement “let’s agree to disagree”. Well the good thing is that there is an alternative to this. That’s agreeing to have a factual basis to our opinions.
To use a silly example: You are having a fight with someone about what the most abundant element in the universe is. You tell him that him that the most abundant element by weight is Hydrogen. He says “No, it’s Carbon!” You say “No, I’ve researched it and it’s definitely Hydrogen”. So he says, “Let’s just agree to disagree”. Well that’s, obviously, idiotic. Sometimes you don’t have to agree to disagree, you can just research the facts and then you don’t have to form an opinion. You can just know the truth.
Of course, this assumes perfect, or at least sufficient, knowledge or information. Unfortunately in political and social discussion there is often insufficient information. Sometimes you really just have to form an opinion.
This brings us to the two kinds of situations where you might form an opinion. The first is where you have to form an opinion, like in the case of voting. In this case you have no option and the forming of an opinion is acceptable and useful. You have to try and get many facts as you can, really look at the options, and do your best to make the right choice.
The second situation involves a scenario where there is actually no need to form an opinion. Either 1, you have facts and opinions are useless, or 2, you don’t have facts and you’re opinion is unnecessary. Therefore, just don’t form an opinion! It’s as easy as that.
Of course you have the RIGHT to an opinion on anything you want. However, please understand that your opinions are not necessarily factual, true, or helpful. Maybe you don’t get a lot out of discussions because you are hiding behind opinions?
4. Using Personal Experience
Now this might seem counter-intuitive to most people, but your personal experience is not (necessarily) the truth, or indicative of the truth or reality. What do I mean by that? It means that even if you’re personal experience of a particular demographic/situation has always been negative, doesn’t mean that the demographic/situation is inherently negative or bad.
To illustrate how silly generalisations can be, imagine you had a friend who only ever brought one lottery ticket in his life, and he happened to win $50 million. Theoretically HIS experience is that if you buy a lottery ticket you will win $50 million. Now he says to you “If you’re having any issues with money just buy a lottery ticket, I brought a single ticket and I won $50 million”. You would most probably reply and say “Well it’s not that simple because you have about a 1 in 50 million chance of winning the lottery and statistically it’s a negative sum game.” You’d be right, but suppose your friend now says “I don’t care what you say, that’s MY experience”. You wouldn’t agree would you? Because he is clearly wrong. His personal experience is a statistical outlier not a norm!
In the same way, let’s say for instance that you know a few people of a specific demographic and all of them exhibit some kind of negative behavior (call it racism, laziness, greed whatever). There are often close to a billion (and at least a couple million) people in the world from any particular demographic. If you look at your “experience”, you probably have minute experience in the subject. This is hardly statistically significant. In fact your experience is not significant at all. In a massive world with billions of people, your miniscule experience of a demographic is NOT significant, and is not sufficient to make generalisations.
Now some of the more astute readers might say “Well if you know 200 people from a particular demographic and all 200 are lazy, then statistically speaking there is a high likelihood that this is indicative of an underlying trend in the general culture”. Well that could be true BUT we live in a big world, with thousands of sub-culture. Everyone’s experience is likely to be localized and limited in scope, therefore whilst 200 out of 200 suggests an issue, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to with gender/race/etc.
Understand that whilst personal experience is critical to human development and often defines so much about us, it does not necessary represent truth.
5. Appealing to Feelings
Like being horrible, this is a topic that doesn’t require much explanation:
Feelings are not correlated to truth or facts in any meaningful way. At all! Just because sometime offends, upsets, hurts, etc. you doesn’t make it wrong. Therefore feelings are meaningless in terms of truth, reason and facts. I think a lot of people argue things just because a comment offends or hurts them. This is pointless, argue using truth, facts, logic and reason. Leave your emotions out of it.
A recent example of this is the recent spate of discussions (read arguments) that have happened regarding the transgender movement. It’s a topic that many people have strong opinions about and this is self-evident if you’ve had even one discussion about this topic. In my case I feel very strongly about the topic of Abortion, but if I can’t present a coherent, logic and factual argument then I’m just wasting my time. No matter how strongly I feel about something, my primary responsibility as an educated, (half) intelligent human being is to use my faculties to search for truth, regardless of my personal feelings or convictions.
So don’t focus on your feelings all the time, BUT this is a double-edged sword. Just because you don’t make arguments purely from feelings doesn’t mean you must ignore them completely. Don’t get so engrossed in the argumentation around an issue that you lose sight of the fact that you are speaking to human beings, that they deserve respect, and that, even though their feelings probably aren’t related to truth in any way, they are real!
6. Conclusion
Political and Social discussions are important, especially in this day and age where common decency seems to have disappeared and vigorous healthy debate has morphed into animosity, censor and fundamentalism.
We all need to start having the right kinds of discussions about the future of our world, politics, society and how this all fits together.
You can do yourself, and those around you, a favour by:
1. Avoiding impolite interactions
2. Really listening to what others are saying
3. Challenging opinions (including your own)
4. Moving beyond your personal experience and
5. Being sensitive to feelings, but not letting them direct your thoughts.
