roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

what you have to realize is that there’s a huge number of people who simply do not have a concept of ‘fact’ and ‘not fact’ with regards to information. they genuinely don’t appear to comprehend the idea of objective reality. any narrative that makes them feel better is true, and any narrative that makes them feel worse is false.

you can’t convince them otherwise. sometimes they grow out of it, but you can’t force it. and a lot of them just aren’t equipped to change, for whatever reason.

you can’t get rid of them or exclude them from the dialogue. it’s a basic flaw of human nature, you’d introduce too much terribleness in the process.

and apparently there are enough of them to elect someone like trump, based on ideas like “repeal obamacare because it has obama in the name” and “anything that makes liberals mad is good for america, up to and including becoming a carbon copy of pre-ww2 germany.”

so what do you do about them? how do you keep them from destroying everything in their blind blundering toward a narrative that makes them feel good? well, you have to either get around them or use them. you have to either set up ironclad protections that even a lie-fed mob can’t break in the interval before their attention is grabbed away by a different pedagogue, or you have to resort to a bit of pedagogy yourself.

i’m not sure about the ethics of telling people what they want to hear in order to get them to do the right thing. but i feel pretty sure progressives could do a WAY better job of making the right thing sound attractive than we’re doing right now. we need to step up our marketing game, y’all. we’re not above it. the objective facts are informing us we can’t be if we want to win.

“We are so smart and so right we shouldn’t HAVE to cooperate with those idiots to get our way!” is a ‘fact’ that both progressives and conservatives enthusiastically subscribe to.