As in, not known to you IRL.
I’ve occasionally brought it up before, but a while back in my reddit days I was in a thread where a “professional deprogrammer” had popped in and was talking about how to “deprogram” conservatives and get them to shift left in their views. It centered around restoring their sense of community and belonging with more balanced viewpoint folks IRL and away from their online echo chambers.
I asked them if they had any way to convert someone you encounter wholly online and they said that it was basically impossible, IRL you have a decent chance, but not online.
I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit, so now I’m curious if anybody here has actually gotten an online conservative to come to the dark side light side?
Most people do not respond to a single argument or fact. They accumulate multiple experiences. This is why the shift happens gradually for most people instead of instantly when they are confronted with facts.
I think contrapoints on YouTube 100% convinced me there is nothing strange or weird about trans people. They are just people and the way society treats them is wrong and we need to change that.
Not to say I hated trans people before but I didn’t know much about it and Natalie did a thorough job explaining in a way that was easy to understand.
I don’t argue with conservatives online to try and change their minds. I argue with them to change the minds of people reading the argument. For every social media user that posts content, there are a thousand lurkers. I post arguments so hopefully some of those lurkers might change their mind away from nationalist authoritarianism
I argue with them to change the minds of people reading the argument.
This is why I would labour to keep arguing until either I get last word, or the interlocutor clearly runs out of good arguments. You can’t reason with people who never reason themselves into an idea to begin with. But you can convince the readers that the idea is dangerous and to keep away!
Yes, however…
- Many people you meet online are not, strictly speaking, people.
- Of the remainder, many are there for a reason.
I would wholeheartedly agree with the deprogrammer with one clarification: “known to you IRL” refers more to anonymity than to whether your interactions take place online, and the reason for that is important to consider.
Yes, and this is generally how it works:
- Establish that you care about their perspective, and truly mean it. Most people can sniff out insincerity.
- Start asking good faith questions about their position. If their beliefs are misguided, they will begin stumbling upon the flaws on their own. It’s okay to guide them gently with the questions, but don’t try to convince of them of any particular viewpoint, and don’t tell them they are wrong either directly or indirectly. That can undo any progress you made. Just focus on encouraging them to deeply analyze logic that you recognize to be flawed.
- Only offer your perspective / opinions if you are asked directly. If you’ve done #1 and #2 well, this should start happening. I recommend understating your opinions. You don’t have to lie, but keep rants to a minimum and use soft language.
- Be consistent. No one changes their world view overnight. It takes planting seeds, watering them consistently, and waiting.
P.S. If you are doing this correctly and with an open mind, there’s actually a good chance you might change your opinions on a some things, and that’s okay (as long as they aren’t harmful). It also can show them by example that opinions are flexible and should be based on evidence, not the other way around.
No, they have ego issues that prevent self reflection.
I was raised super conservative, and the two biggest steps on my journey to the left were Jon Stewart Bernie Sanders
Jon got my attention by pointing out the hypocrisy that did in fact exist on both sides. It gave me a space to exist where I wasn’t just called a wrong dumb redneck and dismissed, but felt like he was actually trying to meet me where I was. That allowed me to let my guard down and actually listen to what he was saying.
Bernie Sanders came along in 2016 at a point where I would’ve called myself a centrist and basically did the same thing. Non judgmentally gave me a space to exist, listed some topics I cared about, then gave me a cause for them.
People don’t like being told they’re wrong. You cannot debate someone out of believing what they believe. What you can do is ask them questions. Get them to consider why they believe what they believe, and eventually they may start seeing contradictions and change their mind on their own.
I drifted slowly from right-libertarian to a more leftish position: pro-union, pro-social-programs, skeptical of the compatibility of unregulated capitalism with individual freedom. Still no fan of tankies.
This wasn’t from anyone sitting down and trying to convince me, though. Part of it was discovering how close right-libertarianism had always been to white-supremacism: some old Ron Paul newsletters were unpleasantly enlightening. Part was seeing people who called themselves “libertarians” line up with the far right to support state violence, especially against black and brown people. And heck, part was from getting richer and seeing how that worked.
I have a lot of sympathy for the frustrations that get young men into right-wing positions and occasionally I try to puncture some of the nonsense they’re being fed.
I was also right libertarian, although I have been called a fascist for that, , anyway I shifted from that slowly into anarchocristianism and I will stay here. I just don’t believe in government anymore only in communities and obviously in God but that’s another story.
I just want people to have their needs covered, to have strong sense of communities (love your neighbors) in non violent environments and I think human government is inherently violent either physically violent or economically violent. Jesus spoke of all this.
What I think people needs to understand is it’s not the same to be left in the US than in Spain for example, different countries have different kinds of issues caused by different ideologies. So it’s easy to understand why someone in Germany loves worker unions but in Spain don’t because in Spain the biggest ones (UGT and CCOO) work for the government (the so called Leftist Psoe)
anarchocristianism
To me this means Dorothy Day or Tolstoy. What does it mean to you?
Come over to anarchism (libertarian socialism). Anarchy isn’t lawlessness; it’s as close as we can get to true democracy. Not this 2 party bullshit. Government AND Corporations and People shouldn’t tread on us. The government should serve the needs of the people and protect their rights from other people.
Side note, if you describe it as Anarchism and avoid saying “left”, “liberal”, or “socialism”. You might be able to reach loosely right-wing people who would otherwise turn off at any of those words.
Thing is, the economists are right about free markets being a good idea; and free markets depend on a certain kind of regulation to exist. The trouble with capitalism is that it’s never been a reliable ally of freedom of any sort; going back to the origins of capitalism in the private funding of colonial slaver monopolies. The association of capitalism with free markets is largely propaganda; capitalism started with colonial slaver monopolies like the VOC; to a first approximation every firm wants to be a monopoly, and a great way of doing that is political corruption; see today’s USA.
But there’s a reason every government since ever — from empires to democracies — has done things like standardize weights & measures, build public goods like roads to enable trade, and establish courts of law to enforce contracts and fair dealing. Those things are really good ideas! And I’m not sure I can credit the left-anarchist proposals to replace them any more than I can credit the anarcho-capitalist ones.
Mutualism sure has some nice ideas though.
Isn’t that just the (American) definition of liberal? That the market works, if restricted and guided enough by the state, so it works in the right way?
Anarchy means “without leaders”, not “without order”.
That is something so very many get wrong, either unintentionally, or because they’ve been told that lie constantly by a hierarchy hell bent on ensuring people can’t think of any other way things are done.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail appeared to have the most accurate representation of anarchy *I* have seen in modern media (that flavor wouldn’t work for a large government though). A fucking satirical comedy no one would take seriously. All other references I’ve seen about anarchy seemed like “fuck the government” was the entire ideology.
I’ve veered mostly into mutualism for awhile. Indavidualist anarchy is a sucker’s game. NOBODY can do everything alone.
Building networks and community? That’s just… what people do.
I was raised Right. Change is a long series of events that no one person or interaction triggers. Dogma is only truly changed from within.
I grew up believing 9/11 was an inside job and the planes were military cargo ones with missile pods and the purpose was an auto-coup and also a heist of the gold bullion stored in the towers basement, vaccines caused autism and a range of other diseases, and I voted for Clive Palmer (Australia’s cheap dollar-store knockoff of Trump).
The turning point for me was getting off 4chan (I went via 99chan which became a nazi site before dying which is not great) , talking to more people besides just my mother and Aunt, and somehow stopping being a contrarian shitgibbon by losing the belief that all politics is irredeemably corrupt and a vote for Clive was a vote for chaos, respectively. I THINK I was looking for a world that was more interesting and made more sense than this one.
Ironically I started my internet life on &TOTSE, which is about as left as Lemmy, but there, I was an antisocial lying troll. Now I am not antisocial anymore.
I still believe that the moon is hollow and inhabited by ancient inbred families of cannibal Reptilians who aim to repopulate the earth but don’t have the means to return, but that’s fairly harmless IMO.
You’ve still got time.
I was in Geometry class when 9/11 happened. The day stopped. The news was turned on in class a few minutes before the second plane struck. I watched it in real time. I had been in those towers 6 months before too…
About the worst rabbit holes for me were giving any audience to perpetual motion trolls, and Brown’s gas nonsense in car stuff.
Everyone tries to simplify messy complexity and we are all tribal in scope. I’ve learned to only pay attention to people with academic credentials. I don’t watch translated nonsense from general news outlets. The information I pick up elsewhere is more collectivised where I expect to see a bunch of people talking about something from different angles before I view the information as relevant. I also do not care for any outlets claiming to bridge some divided narrative as these are controlling where the line in the sand is drawn. If two parties are Right and Right-Jihadists like in the USA, calling one party Left is manipulating by validating the status quo and outdated perspective.
What changed me started with stratification of rock layers and realizing deep time was not compatible with my religious narrative. I encountered a sharp personal dislike for biases and prejudice against others without logic or reason. I encountered a lot of plausible seeming arguments, but ultimately the people making those arguments had nothing to offer; they are trolls with no depth, interests, personality, community, richness in life. Look at such a person’s profile and they are not real. There is no greater engagement or value they add to the world. All they do is make arguments that muddle political narratives. I learned to view these people as either getting paid to post or idiots. I care about real people and that means your politics should only ever be a small part of your person and profile. Any person that lacks a serious passion project and hobby(s) but posts their politics is a joke to me.
In a way, I extend this to any group now. Like do people in your group include Nobel laureates that contribute significantly to the advancement of humanity. Because if they don’t, why bother wasting time with fools that lack top aspirations. Live life with no excuses. Excuses are for fools. Do the best you can with the cards you’re dealt in life.
I’ve just met more people. Friends coming out kind of forces you to re-evaluate the casual *phobia. I don’t think online can do it. You have to experience and learn yourself.
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Fair point, people are different.
Maybe but I feel I’ve made it worse sometimes too.
There’s a couple sayings. ‘The smart man sounds like crazy man to the stupid man’ and ‘You can’t win an argument with an idiot’.
As complex as it can be, it usually boils down to that or you just find out they’re rich, selfish, like control, and love schadenfreude.
Don’t know if I’ve ever done it, but it was done to me.
So, it’s obviously possible.
I’m pretty amused by the mix of comments where people are offering up themselves as irrefutable evidence, while others proclaim with certainty it can’t be done. Actually a humbling perspective see people who’ve convinced themselves trying to convince others I don’t exist.
Well it can be done, IRL, and it does seem as though it can be done online as long as it’s across a time span of years and a deep well of mutual respect to lean on.
I struggle with how to word my thoughts about this, but online, text-based communication seems to always start out being interpreted as negative in its messaging. So those reading tend to assume the sender is being disingenuous from the start.
That’s why it may take longer to deprogram via online methods than in person. Online, we have to first get past the perception that we are disingenuous or mocking the reader. It’s not easy to do when right-wing propagandists have fed them a steady diet of tribalism and mistrust for the last couple of decades (at least).
In person, we can verbally relay those things we can’t accurately convey in text with nonverbal cues: emotion and sincerity. It can also be easier to cut off misunderstandings before they can reinforce those negative assumptions by gauging someone’s nonverbal communications in the moment, something we can’t do while they read our words.
It’s weird cause it can feel like it takes a month of chats online to equal the same progress as chatting in person for an hour. I made the time comparison up, but I’m sure you understand my meaning. Trying to do this online is just time-consuming and that’s not to mention the person you are talking to has to WANT to discuss these things with you.
I just wish it was easier for me to stomach the bullshit and vitriol IRL.
Would you mind sharing more details on your experience?
Like, was it a single person that got you thinking, or feedback from a group?
Is there a particular conversation that you remember as the start of change, or rather a gradual shift over time?
Did/was something happen(ing) in your personal life at the time that made you more open to hearing another opinion?
It was a confluence of things.
And to set the stage, political leanings are complex. There is a tendency (insistence, I’d even say now) to collapse a 10 dimensional notion to 1D. At the time (myself, and what conservative parties were offering) aligned on a retrospectively narrow majority of dimensions.
I’d really drank the capitalism kool aid. You work hard, you get rewarded. The role of the government is to facilitate the opportunities by putting business is a favourable position to incentivize the creation of opportunities to create jobs. Poor people don’t want to work; if the jobs are readily available it’s on them for not participating.
I’d also really drank the baseless vibe Kool aid. “Conservatives are good at economy” “Conservatives are for personal freedom”. These associations were unchallenged through my youth. You spend 20 years internalizing those “truths”, it’s nonsensical to expect to convince someone otherwise in minutes.
I grew up in a rural area. It was just accepted as truth. There were no homeless people in my sightlines. I understood their experience as much as I understood the experience of a kangaroo.
I moved to the city, and my friend group was a mixed bag politically. Nobody too far in any direction, and politics wasn’t a major topic of conversation.
I did have a gaming buddy, though, full on communist. Super smart dude. Loves Talking about politics. Usually voice chat. A few times a year he’d be in town and we could meet for lunch or something.
I think eventually I would have shifted my perspective organically as a function of just having a broadened perspective, but he was certainly the catalyst.
Things I took as true, he’d say “no” and have data to show it. We’re men of an era, so I wouldn’t say he was “nice” about it, but it was never personal attacks.
We would (and still do) argue. At length. It wasn’t an overnight thing. It was a years thing.
When I mentioned earlier about the many constituent pieces of a political leaning, those really just got dismantled one by one. Or, shifted. I still think personal freedom is important. I just now reject the idea that conservatives offer policy to support that value.
Nobody has asked, but I think the key for me was to not make it about identity. Show how your values don’t map to the political party you think you support. When I’d challenge, he would respond directly. If we were talking about… I dunno… Taxes, and he felt like I was making points that he didn’t have the greatest answers for, he wouldn’t just change the subject (but her emails!) kinda thing. He loves being right but he had the integrity to not switch gears just to “win”. That built a lot of trust.
It was probably a few years before I actually ever read any backing sources he ever provided. But eventually, I was just too curious. If he hadn’t built that trust I don’t think I ever would have.
I don’t think anyone can flip someone with an identity-based political association in a single conversation online. If the relationship is transient, there is no trust.
You gotta charge up the person’s curiosity level. I think many people can contribute to that, though.
People who trip over themselves to make broad statements about how stupid and terrible you are for how you voted reduce the curiosity. People who respectfully engage with curiosity, avoiding identity attacks raise it.
And, it’s not just me who believes this. Putin does, as well: it’s the playbook for destabilizing western democracy. His troll farms are designed to get people to just snap at eachother and write eachother off as terrible people and lost causes.
Before deleting most of my Reddit stuff, I had a good conversation with a conservative about climate change. They pulled out all the standard right wing talking points, and I tried to remain respectful as I provided sources that refuted every one. One they threw out that I hadn’t heard of at the time was “global wobbling,” which I had to look up. 10- minutes later, I responded, with sources, saying that it was yet another thing the right throws out to confuse the issue for voters, but something climate scientists are well aware of and can measure and predict. At that point, they thanked me for all the info and said they had some reading to do. That’s the best I’ve ever gotten. Don’t know if they changed their view, though.
I’d like to stay optimistic and hope they did as well, though if my own experience is any indicator, there’s equal chance they fell into the pit of “Maybe climate change is real, but it’s not that bad/it’s better for me.”
Ill be honest, thats a victory in itself. Creating a crack isnt a loss. Its progress. As small as it may be. A damn doesnt fail because of a meteor hitting it. Its a crack here, a fracture there. It adds up.
The resiliency of that mentality isnt impenetrable.
Confronting them with the flaws in their thinking only makes them double down:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202401/why-do-people-double-down
Which is why direct confrontation is always a bad idea. You basically have to guide them into coming to the correct conclusion on their own without overtly trying to convince them.
If they won’t change their mind, is doubling down any different than continuing to believe what they already believe?
They actively reject the evidence and believe what they want to an even greater degree.
How is the outcome any different when the end result is them continuing to hold the same opinions contrary to evidence?
Doubling down makes them even more entrenched, then they start believing CRAZIER things.
I mean, this is psychology, not politics or logic. When someone is told not to do something they feel they have the right to do, they are more likely to do it. When someone is told they’re stupid when they have been trained to feel correct and logical, they are more likely to stand by that belief. If a figure that they have developed a vicarious, parasocial relationship with is validly criticized, they will denounce the critic as if it were an attack on the core of their being, rather than agree with the critique.
These right-wing beliefs are like psychological parasites, ticks. The only correct solutions are to remove it with surgical precision with a careful plan. Prodding it and squeezing it is what you instinctively want to do, but that just makes it dig in further.
People think that they are rational, but rational thought has virtually nothing to do with right-wing beliefs. Instead, it’s all about feelings. They believe whatever they feel is true, and bury themselves in echo chambers where everyone believes the same things, so that they aren’t confronted with cognitive dissonance.
When their alt right beliefs bite them in the ass they don’t change their mind.
What kind of careful approach do you think is going to magically work? Why would any approach make anything better or worse when they won’t change due to direct negative impacts to themselves from their own actions.
Well, a single action is never going to de-program these people. You ask why any approach would make anything better or worse, but I noted why certain approaches make things worse. I don’t know how to affirmatively convince these people, but I’d say a necessary (even if not sufficient) condition to making things better is not making them worse.
Cool, cool. Let’s placate the bullies and hope for the best!
Can’t tell if you’re talking about religion or conservatives.
Just kidding, it’s the same mental weakness being exploited in both groups.
It’s like Trump himself, saying bullshit like it’s the first he’s ever heard of it or whatever.
Thanks for chiming in, Genocide Jordan.
You guys must hate it when I point this stuff out:
I was raised Christian. I was taught homosexuality was a sin. I used to angrily preach at others to convert them or they’ll burn in hell. etc. etc.
Fuck those people
That said, no, I have not succeeded in shifting anyone’s views ever. Typically the people I encounter are beyond saving unless the things happening directly impact them.
I just humour people when they tell me political opinions I don’t agree with. No one ever changes their minds.
