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Comment by alwa | Hacker News Reader

At the same time, I feel like most everybody feels that they themself are a good, kind, caring person. I could imagine even the schizophrenic mother the author mentions describing her motivations in terms of good, kind, and caring intentions, e.g. to protect her family from the various space aliens and demonic possessions and so on.

If there’s room for a “bad guys” construct to be useful at all, I’m not sure it’s to draw moral validation from the degree of your pessimism and fatalism, the degree to which people characterize you as a downer or a “bad guy.”

Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?

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>Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?

I feel this is the difference between "protest" and "persuasion." Protest is simply stating what I believe in. Persuasion is communicating what I believe in in terms consistent with the target audience's values. The latter requires understanding different value systems well enough that you can speak to them credibly. I thought the book "Strangers in Their Own Land" [1] is a great example of that, where a self-described hippie Berkeley professor finds common cause about environmental destruction with people in blood-red Louisiana.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land

Strangers in Their Own Land is an odd citation here - it doesn't really talk about convincing people so much as understanding their concerns.

It's not uncommon for folks to have real problems in their everyday lives caused by the changing world, but be unwilling to grapple with the actual causes and potential solutions, which require hard decisions and time and sacrifice, rather than blaming it all on communists and trans people who they can persecute right here right now and feel good about it.

> At the same time, I feel like most everybody feels that they themself are a good, kind, caring person.

FWIW, take my data-point: no.

You probably don’t like it any more than I do, but the people who, for example, are fighting every day to remove rights from minority groups do, in large part, believe that they are kind.

Brainwashing is a helluva drug.

They do not view the systematic attack of minority groups as “evil” because they have been brainwashed in to believing that the groups they are attacking are evil, so, to them, their hypocrisy is justified as righteous.

a good example is the work of daryl davis who managed to convince people to leave and denounce the kkk. i believe that the reason his approach worked is because those people believed that they were good people, and they left the kkk once they realized that they were actually wrong and prejudiced. if they had seen themselves as evil they would not have left, because doing so would have meant to stop being evil. but they left because they realized that being in the kkk was a contradiction to how they saw themselves.

My understanding of Davis’s work is that some key parts of it also include finding common ground with the other person, treating them as a decent and reasonable person, and letting them come to their own conclusions. There is a respect and humanity baked in to his method

yes, exactly, he treated them like they saw themselves.

it wouldn't work if that understanding wasn't there on both sides.

from my own experience i find it most frustrating when i try to tell someone that their actions are hurtful, and they respond "nah, i am just like that, i can't change", because they have a negative image of themselves.

"“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Going on a huge tangent here, but this mindset is part of why I can barely stand Reddit, but simultaneously can tolerate 4chan. Stuff is barely taken seriously but at the same time many there are aware of that and will simply take off once satisfied for that period. Some reddit dwellers seem to feel like it's the life mission to "fight X" and they genuinely believe they are making the world a better place.

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