You cannot convince anyone to support your side if you don’t understand the opposition. My critiques of the “left” and the “right” are effective because I actually talk to them and make an effort to understand and address their real concerns.
So how do I convince left-wingers to listen? There’s no arguing with people who will write everyone off as a racist, sexist, ist ist ism the moment they disagree. But many reasonable left-wingers have changed their views on Trump supporters, covid approaches, and other issues owing to my posts. Some have even changed their votes and their affiliation forever. Sometimes, all they need is more information about the right, and their eyes jolt open. They realize they’ve been lied to by their media about what right-wingers are actually like, and then they go down the rabbit hole, and thank me for opening their eyes and saving them from indoctrination. However, this doesn’t reach everyone. So what about the rest?
It’s nearly impossible to convince most left wingers of any singular argument. This has to be a systemic awakening in most cases, since their reason for writing off disagreement needs to be dismantled before they can even hear you as a human where politics are concerned.
Essentially, they trust their sources, and they don’t trust yours. So they ask me to send sources, and then they look it up to see if those sources are legit according to their system of source-trusting. Yet I explain to them that I don’t trust sources at all. I do consult sources, but I don’t trust anything that gaslights me so deeply, telling me that my lived and experienced reality isn’t real. Therein lies the key: they trust sources before reality. They will discount their own real, lived experience in favor of a written source, no matter how harmful that denial is to their psyche. They don’t trust themselves to discern what is real. And by that same token, they don’t trust you to discern what is real either.
Critical thinking involves trusting our own senses and listening to our own hearts, then comparing our ‘sources’ to the reality around us. For instance, do you really believe this person is racist? Is it doing more harm than good to call people racists? Most reasonable leftists do listen if I can manage to point out the difference between books and my real, lived reality, especially if I bring in my experience as a chronically ill person with an unrecognized illness; a Jew who was subject to systemic violence, etc. They are generally very receptive to real stories of systemic injustice, and if I can demonstrate how ‘academic sources’ betrayed me, and how academia excludes my entire illness for political reasons, they will often take pause. And some, from here on out, might start thinking about their reality and its opposition to the books as well.
There are good reasons they believe what they do, and a lot of the indoctrination works because there’s major truth to it. Basically it exposes real problems and then exploits them to create divides & perpetuate hatred. So they need to discern where that point actually is. And then, they realize they were taught to hate conservatives, to distrust sources that aren’t approved by their experts, and to thus restrict themselves to a tiny bubble of thought which has elevated itself over all the rest by calling itself ‘academia.’ A good example of this is that western medicine has gained such popularity by restricting who is allowed to practice, and what is considered medicine. But there was effective medicine for centuries before that, and people practice various types of healing all around the world. The western medical industry is exclusive, however, and everyone just accepts its superiority- but why? Most doctors don’t even bother addressing basics like nutrition, mindset and exercise. Is this really the most ideal method of healing? Does it make sense to write off meditation as ‘spiritual’ and acupuncture as ‘alternative?’ Can you heal by identifying academic sources, taking the pills they’re selling, and neglecting your body? Who actually benefits from this dependency on big pharma? If you start thinking about how the whole system is created to necessitate itself, you then see that the government also excels at necessitating itself. And you start thinking differently about everything.
Those who defer to authority are quite literally ‘authoritarian.’ Without any positive or negative connotations, that is what it actually means. Who has the right to decide who else is an expert? Who benefits from this process? Who gets left behind? These are the deepest questions we must address when dealing with the left. They are quick to write off non-academic opinions as ‘conspiracy theories,’ and to presume private outsiders have nefarious agendas – yet they resist making this assumption about their own trusted elites. Each system (such as ‘the medical industry’) has to be dissected from the bottom up. And people must understand that deferring to sources is authoritarian – which isn’t entirely bad, as it makes no sense to weigh every random opinion equally. But if we allow one elite group to decide who is worthy of speaking, there are consequences to consider. Historically, these consequences are often severe, benefitting a small oligarchy who starve, impoverish, or murder the rest of us. And right now, as we speak, the consequences of cancel culture, widening divides, and increasing poverty are plain to see. Leftists must consider whether this is the culture they want to support, and whether they are behaving in accordance with their own values.
And how do I know this, and why am I so effective? Because, essentially, I am one of them. I’m very liberal-minded and I excelled at academia. While ‘academic sources’ have much to offer, I’ve been forced to see further in order to survive. I watched everyone around me fall prey to “elite sources” & cancel people for any disagreement – and I saw no great reason to resist, as their viewpoints seemed to echo genuine research. But then academia denied my illness, and doctors nearly killed me and left me disabled forever. Having access to independent doctors and affordable choices for insurance saved my life. When I questioned big pharma’s power-grab called ‘Obamacare’ – which limited access to said services for everyone – my friends called me racist, far right, ist ist ism, and I lost my jobs, fans and platform for speaking out about my lived experience. At that moment, I recognized how serious the gaslighting culture was. It didn’t matter if I was right or wrong. These people knew what I went through, yet they were quick to shut me up. Despite their claims to care about marginalized people, they labeled me with the worst intent possible, and refused to comprehend my point of view.
After that, I started doing research and found out about Alinsky and Wilson and others who got their views deeply embedded into media and schoolbooks in order to indoctrinate everyone in the long-run. I learned to ‘follow the money’ and see who was benefitting from pushing certain viewpoints. (Newsflash: it’s not you or me.) And I saw how this played out in my actual life as far back as I could remember, and it all made sense. As Hitler said – if you own the schools and the media, you own the future.
