A suggestion to reduce fanaticism

Every morning around seven, except Monday and Wednesday, I go to buy bread at the neighborhood store. It is a meeting point and exchange of opinions between landlords.

“Everything is going up and the blockade is getting worse,” commented a troubled landlady.

—Yes, what will we do? The bakers have said that they are no longer going to make the marraqueta because they don’t have flour – the owner of the store responded worriedly.

—What do you say that you go out on Tiktok and TV? Do you think the situation is going to get better or worse?—the landlady asked me.

—Everything tends to get worse, lady; “Look at the line for gas,” I responded, and when I was about to explain, another woman interrupted me.

—You must be from the right; Therefore, he says that the situation is going to worsen.

—The data, Madam, indicate that the situation will worsen; The economic crisis is not recent, it started years ago—I replied and when I was about to argue, the lady interrupted me again.

—The right speaks badly of Evo; Thanks to him we have roads, schools, before him there was nothing.

When I was about to explain the causes of the crisis, my self told me: wait a minute, you won’t be able to persuade the lady, you didn’t even mention Don Evo and she thought you did; Better go home with your tummy.

I came back thinking about the attitude of the lady who didn’t want to hear anything that challenged her beliefs or conclusions. Their cognitive confirmation bias was high. That reaction was bouncing around in my head for hours.

British writer Clive Staples Lewis, better known as CS Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote: “He may be full of goodness and common sense, but he inhabits a tiny world in which we should feel suffocated. The man who is content to be only himself and, therefore, a reduced being, finds himself in a prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented.”

This text is in the book “The Reading Experience”, a philosophical-literary essay on the value of reading to empathize and explore human diversity. People have a Plato’s Cave in our heads; We run the risk of staying in that Cave if we do not dare to see reality from other eyes, from other minds.

The lady believes that everything started at a certain time and with a certain person because her points of reference and perhaps experience begin there. She and I have different stories, different origins, varied cultures, but we live in a single reality. So, why does she see that reality in a certain way and why do I in another?

The difference is in the inputs. She is not exposed to the media that I am exposed to, nor to the books I read or the social group I frequent. She may read other texts, get information through other media and interact in other circles.

Although the time of birth, place, circumstances and genes determine a person’s profile, the social circle or group can be decisive. Neuroscience concluded that mirror neurons are activated in this interaction both when a person performs an action and when he observes another person perform the same action. These neurons facilitate observational learning, allowing individuals to learn behaviors by observing others. For this reason, surveys do not ask the entire population, they only take a sample divided into segments.

The German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann explains, in her book “the spiral of silence: Public opinion, our social skin”, that public opinion is a social force that regulates people’s behavior, since it determines what is acceptable to express and what is not. How to change the opinion of the landlady and other people like her, capable of blocking their own people to prevent the politician they admire from being investigated for a case of statutory rape?

It seems difficult, but not so difficult if we try to see reality through the eyes of those people as CS Lewis suggests. Starting by telling them that they are wrong can be counterproductive because it will generate in them the cognitive bias called perseverance in beliefs.

The more you tell them they are wrong, the more they will cling to their beliefs. So, we have to start by empathizing and producing information from their eyes, but at the same time challenging their worlds. Telling a person that they are right, but there is something else they need to know, can unblock their mental resistances.

Practicing intellectual humility is an important signal for the interlocutor who is in a radically opposite position. Demonstrating a willingness to admit that you don’t know everything, that you could be wrong, and that you are even willing to change your mind, can open the other person’s mind to critical thinking.

Then, the same person may question their beliefs until they seek other sources of information based on evidence, data and real testimonies. It’s not an easy job. Fanaticism will not change in one talk, but in many, and through information and challenging, but not offensive, communication.

I will talk to the lady again as many times as necessary. That he calls me right-wing does not worry me, it does worry me that he reduces his world to an isolated group where opinion control is authoritarian and where there is a leadership that thinks what it thinks and acts as it acts because of its economic well-being and the satisfaction of its objectives. of power depends on the manipulation of souls.

That leadership not only spreads the lie knowing that it is a lie, but also believing its own lie.

It is everyone’s task because a society with fanatical people results in an authoritarian polis, annihilator of diversity, which is a source of creativity and the engine that moves human nature towards the use of reason to collaborate, improve ourselves and improve coexistence in community. . We are designed to collaborate, rather than block each other.