Most of my friends are sort of low-effort leftists; they’re mostly uninformed about anything and are on the left by default, because the right is portrayed as being greedy, racist, and stupid. And you don’t want to be stupid, do you?
So when I talk to them I try to avoid anything political. It’s just frustrating. Sometimes I get dragged into it anyway, though, and lately when that happens I’ve noticed something new and scary: I find myself asking, “what can’t this person think?”
Not, “why can’t this person think.” Most of the time they can think, they just think differently than me, which I expect. But there seem to be lots of ideas that people are afraid to let themselves think now. Thoughts you can’t have.
A couple that are relevant right now: “are masks actually effective at controlling covid-19?” “are the president’s claims that the vote count was fraudulent well-founded?”
People can’t think that. If you present them with anything that even approaches those ideas, they instantly turn on you and say you’re stupid, deluded, a conspiracy theorist… And the problem is that those are questions, not claims. You aren’t allowed to think the questions.
Look at commentators online, how careful every single one of them is to say that they’re not saying the virus isn’t serious, they’re not saying anything about the veracity of such and such claims, they’re not saying this or that… They’re afraid someone will call them out and cancel them for thinking the unthinkable thought.
This isn’t new, either. It’s new with these two ideas, but there have been questions that for years would get you cast out for asking: “do vaccines work” and “is the earth a sphere or a disc” for example. And to blunt my point a bit, I am sure both that vaccines work and that the earth is a sphere. I’m not one of those crazies…
This is the idea of heresy, updated for the present day. It’s one of the things the first amendment was intended to protect us from, because “it’s one thing to be asked to respect someone’s beliefs but another to be asked to respect their taboos.” We have to be allowed, socially as well as strictly legally, to question this stuff.
Here are some other unthinkable thoughts:
- Is there a supernatural component to the universe, like God or an afterlife, or is it all made up?
- Is diversity a good thing?
- Are there benefits to having an authoritarian society?
- Is safety always the most important consideration?
- Is it possible to “love the sinner, hate the sin;” can you hate what someone believes (if that belief is a core part of their identity) and not hate that person?
- Is there a possible situation in which the way CNN / etc / the left are currently acting is correct? What would have to be true for you to behave the way they are?
Does asking any of those questions make you uncomfortable? Are your answers to all of them things you would feel comfortable talking about at work? Do you understand why you would answer each of those the way you do? Are there any where you’re not sure of the answer?
13 replies on “What can’t people think?”
Yep, I’m with the cognitive dissonance on those people.
Well, this is one of those cognitive dissonance things, where if you’re a Christian, you better go hide under a basket but Jews and Muslims are free to say whatever they want about God. Flying spaghetti monsters and other silly things are also perfectly ok.
As long as you follow the orthodoxy, sure. To flip Henry Ford, you can be any color in the box as long as you’re Crayola. I like the T-shirt that says “Celebrate diversity” under a 4×5 table of various pistols.
Mike Rowe’s Safely Third movement is gaining popularity. I think the ideas behind it are also quite powerful. We all do a lot of things that are not, strictly speaking, “safe” but we do them daily anyway. This is one of the great topics of taking it to the logical conclusion, where no one should be driving a car with all of the accidents, property damage and death that result.
I think this get a lot more metaphorical and metaphysical the more you want to think about it. What makes up a person? What is hate and what does it mean to hate a person who can hate you back or hate a thing that cannot? What is the purpose of loving or hating the sinner? Do you believe they can turn from this intrinsic belief that makes the core of their person and become something better or do you believe they are a lost cause, to be damned before they are dead? They say the opposite of love isn’t hate but apathy, and if someone had some idea that was so abhorrent and they were irredeemable, I think I would look to ignore them as much as possible, not engage with them if at all possible and only interact when necessary to stop the spread of their ideas but more by working with the people open to those ideas.
I am 100% certain that the Earth is not flat, and I can prove it:
If the Earth was flat, cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now.
So, does the Earth ask if the dress makes her look flat, or fat?
That’s as serious as I can get about that notion.
Round-Earther here and I’m sorry to say I know of a few Flat-Earthers that tell me the earth is flat and I’m stupid to think otherwise. So I ask them, “then where’s the edge?” I get no reply and I haven’t talked to any of them in quite some time now.
I had somebody once ask me how I could prove it. Being ex-Navy, I had what, to me, seemed like an obvious answer.
Go find a town on the beach, with a reputation for clear weather. Pick a hotel near the beach. Stand in front of it and look out to see. Find a ship at anchor way out on the horizon, zoom in as much as you can, and take a picture.
Now take the elevators to the top floor of the hotel, find a window facing the sea, find that same ship. Take another picture.
Compare.
There’s a whole bunch of the hull of that ship that is visible in the picture from the top floor that is not visible in the picture from the beach. You KNOW it isn’t because of hills or other geography in the way. It’s water, the tallest thing out there is waves.
Therefore the curvature of the Earth is blocking part of your view from the beach.
As I said, I’m ex-Navy. I believe the Earth is curved because I personally have seen the curvature of the Earth many, many times.
Another argument is to observe the curvature when at 30000+ feet (something that many of us civilians can easily do within a commercial airplane). It is not an optical illusion. Unfortunately, those who ascribe to the flat earth myth as fact can neither comprehend 3-D geometry nor believe their own “lying” eyes. They would rather invent excessively complex and nonphysical models to support their delusions.
It may have been Red Green who said it, “You can’t fix stupid — even will endless rolls of duct tape.”
Wow… being from the Deep South, I know… if you can’t fix it with duct tape, it’s DONE BROKE.
What I would say: go online and find some people from Australia. Make sure they’re other flat earthers, so you know they’re not lying… Ask them if the sun is out.
Well put, Ross! One of the most valuable things I’ve learned from Bill, that has greatly improved such situations for me, is the practice of granting the premise and asking further questions. If X is true, then what does that imply, and what are the consequences? Which of course runs into the problem of raising uncomfortable of forbidden questions, or contradictions or flaws in reasoning that they maybe just haven’t ever thought about. The problem I run into now is that I ask too many questions. Such situations usually end with the other(s) shutting down and saying they don’t want to talk about whatever it is anymore (it’s too upsetting for them) and me saying no, this is interesting, let’s keep going! It’s rapidly becoming clear that the left have become everything they warned me about when I was growing up: an uptight, rigid orthodoxy that enforces rigid speech codes and demands compliance. They’ve become the very humorless, moralizing scolds that they’ve spent years tarring the right as, and I find great enjoyment in poking at that edifice.
> It’s rapidly becoming clear that the left have become everything they warned me about when I was growing up: an uptight, rigid orthodoxy that enforces rigid speech codes and demands compliance.
I mean I absolutely agree with you, but I think that the right is in danger of that happening also. A couple of my example unthinkables up there, I imagine a lot of people on the right would have a hard time asking honestly. At least one of them is one I have a hard time thinking about.
One thing that worries me a lot is that I think the right is going to do the thing that the left did in the last four years: lose an election and then blame it on everyone but ourselves. We all laughed about Clinton and blaming it on deplorables, Russia, Pepe the Frog… I remember joking that her book asked and answered the question right on the cover: “What happened? Hillary Clinton.”
On the one hand this would be fine, I’d love to see the Biden administration paralyzed for four years by investigations just like the Trump administration has been. But what if there was no fraud, or there was very little fraud and it didn’t affect the overall outcome… What then? We need to change our ideas to be more in line with what the majority of the country wants, that’s what. Let’s not be afraid to think about that, if in fact Trump is not chosen by the electoral college in a couple weeks.
I’d hate to stoop to the levels of insanity of the left, but under NO circumstances can the “Harris/Biden ticket ” be allowed to take over the White House. But what can we do?
On the “what if there was no fraud” I saw an article with a few legal ways the left skewed the election that were not fraud, but were ways we should look at cleaning up the election process. One was billionaires donating money to a charity that then paid a local election office (in Philly in one case) because you can just give more money to govt than the tax man asks, and then with that money send out a lot of mail in ballots, buy more machines to count said ballots, and generally just get a lot of Democrat voting people to vote and drive up the numbers. When you just get a lot of people in 1-2 districts already represented by local Democrats, you don’t change the state houses at all, which explains those numbers.