Something all too common with extremists. It’s fruitless to argue with facts and logic™ since they live in a different reality.
The only way to get through to them is playing therapist and figuring out their emotions and getting them to question themselves. Questions like, why does China have a stock exchange? Why can’t you be gay in Russia? Why did Lenin say don’t let Stalin take control? That’s why they band together so much and silence all opposition that ask questions, they can’t risk thinking inwards. They need to affirm each other, while non-extremists don’t need to, since reality is on their side.
I agree mostly with that but i also, personally, need to keep on top of adequately questioning my own reasoning.
Just because i think reality is on my side doesn’t make it automatically true, I’m not immune to propaganda or fallacious logic.
Even worse (for me personally) is the trap of assuming my subjective (and relatively well reasoned ) correctness in other conversations carries over in to whatever conversation I’m having right now.
A sense of conversational and intellectual superiority can be an insidious path to closed mind.
“What is not reasoned in, cannot be reasoned out.”
Something all too common with extremists. It’s fruitless to argue with facts and logic™ since they live in a different reality.
The only way to get through to them is playing therapist and figuring out their emotions and getting them to question themselves. Questions like, why does China have a stock exchange? Why can’t you be gay in Russia? Why did Lenin say don’t let Stalin take control? That’s why they band together so much and silence all opposition that ask questions, they can’t risk thinking inwards. They need to affirm each other, while non-extremists don’t need to, since reality is on their side.
I agree mostly with that but i also, personally, need to keep on top of adequately questioning my own reasoning.
Just because i think reality is on my side doesn’t make it automatically true, I’m not immune to propaganda or fallacious logic.
Even worse (for me personally) is the trap of assuming my subjective (and relatively well reasoned ) correctness in other conversations carries over in to whatever conversation I’m having right now.
A sense of conversational and intellectual superiority can be an insidious path to closed mind.