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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

> the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg.

That's the entire point. That's why the speech ends with "your move, chief".

Sean (Williams' character) is deliberately being confrontational because Will is avoiding making any psychological progress by putting on a fake mask, an avoidance strategy which has been successful with previous psychologists. Sean sees what Will doing and knows that the only way to get Will to stop is to knock the mask off.

In order to get through to Will, Sean has to make Will stop putting up a front, which Will doesn't want to do. So Sean has to go on the attack and break down Will's resistance. He does that by taking a direction that he know will be effeective: Will's own insecurities about his lack of lived experience.

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> That's the entire point.

Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense.

People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. They don’t take off their mask because you make a big speech and confront them about it. The perspective that this speech has—it is telling me that a forceful, paternalistic approach can fix people. If somebody needs to talk but won’t, you can break down the walls. I disagree with that.

I remember feeling like the world worked this way. I remember feeling that maybe I could be broken down and fixed by the right person. Back when I was the age Matt Damon was when he wrote this movie, maybe I would have agreed with it.

But what have I seen since then? I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people. That the person giving the speech rarely understands their target well enough to know which buttons to push. That trained psychologists know better than to try and take their patients down a peg.

You completely nailed it.

> Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense. > People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. > [...] > I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people.

In recent years I grew to hate narratives. They give the readers the illusion of attaining some deeper understanding of actual reality (of human psychology in this case). While what the actually do is just pushing readers further away from the truth in the direction of a particular deviation in perception of reality that the writer had.

Given narrative is most attractive for the people who have similar errors in the perception of reality that the author had and reading pushes them further away. Confirming their biases. Regardless of what the reality actually is.

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