Why we don’t argue with Conservatives anymore

It’s just not the best use of our Time

Have you ever been in an argument with someone who just didn’t want to understand you? You’re not alone. The problem is our inability to question our own core beliefs.

We often think of ourselves as gods who “have the fullest knowledge and embody prescience of every minor event of every period and every epoch from the beginning of Time to its end[1]”. And we know it’s ridiculous. Now, there are multiple ways to respond to that.

Deny it

Why would you acknowledge you’re wrong. Let’s say you believe in God (which can’t be disproved anyway, so you must be right, right?). And you believe in God so much, that you don’t accept any other guidance, advice or rules. Then you surely don’t want to admit you’ve spent your whole life studying one book, when you could have studied many which are as good or even better. Why would you make yourself feel stupid? And why would you want to admit to your neighbor they were smarter than you?

And even if you did acknowledge you’re wrong; why should other people’s wrong views be any better than yours?

Tell everyone they are wrong

Believe me, everyone will love you... But at least, you’ll be right in that one thing.

Sadly you’re not the first one to find out (have you ever heard of this man in ancient Greece, what was his name again?) and you’re also not really helping. So stop it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong

Yes and no. While it might not matter to the universe, since its a problem of definition anyway, it might matter a lot to your surroundings.

Admit you’re wrong

Tell everyone how stupid you were. The Problem is, when you admit it, they will think they are right.

Try to be as right as possible

You might think, the more I learn, the more I know, the more likely I am to be right. And you probably are. The more you learn, the more you see how wrong others are. You start looking at politicians and CEOs and think: they have no idea what they are doing. You start to think, how could I do this better. And then you start to think, why am I not the one in charge. Why am I not the CEO. Your ideas become your most important capital, they are what you are. And If they are you, they can’t be wrong.

As soon as you are unable or unwilling to give up your progressive ideas, even without the consent of large portions of the population and people of knowledge you are risking dilettantism (no matter how much you learn, you can’t know everything) and your chance of being wrong increases.

But what about that not talking to Conservatives thing?

As long as everyone can’t admit that what they believed their whole life may be wrong (e.g. religious people, scientists and politicians) it is impossible to come to a pleasing conclusion for everyone.

Let me summarize what I just told you seconds ago. There are two things which are (at least with our limited human abilities) impossible to achieve : Universal Truth and Universal Agreement. Why both of them? Because they are the same thing.

So why are we even trying?

Let me introduce another factor to the equation:

Time

Even people who feel more at home in the pecuniary businesses than philosophy would agree to the fact that Time is precious; be it simply for the reason that it is scarce and can’t be augmented. If you never have thought about it yet, which I think most of my readers actually have, think about it now.

Our Era is a time of accelerated change[2]. While our lifespan increases (although not too much since the Corona Virus), giving us a feeling of non-urgence, change actually happens faster, urging us to act fast.

There are differences in how fast a person or institution can act. Individuals can act fast. Within a fragment of a second. A group of people has a longer reaction time. So do capitalistic companies, political parties, NGOs and autocracies. But the longest action and reaction time has a democracy. At least a democracy as we know it: founded between the 1780ies and 1950, large parliaments and working analogous.

So you could say, the more people are involved, the slower it gets. But there are phenomenons happening fast exactly because many people are contributing to it: Climate Change, Human Exploitation, Inequality, Political Polarization, Racism.

I doubt there is enough time to even try to explain our ideas to other people who aren’t willing to even admit to the reality of the other person in the tiniest bit for personal or financial reasons. Wouldn’t that justify ignoring them? Just pushing past them, make the changes that are necessary.

Yet… have you ever tried to change the direction of a stream by yourself?

The Stream of Time

It seems to me that there has been a trend in European and American history towards progressive ideas, making the progressive people of yesterday the conservative people of today. This however does not mean it needs to continue this way (which btw. would create a linguistic problem too: can something be called new if the old thing outlasts it?).

The greatest danger to a progressive (I want to say more humane) future (for everyone) are exactly those new threats that I listed above, which will radically alter the rules of our little game we’ve been playing since the Neolithic (the transcript of which is called History), such as climate change, more pandemics, alien invasions (who knows…), gods be scientifically proven real (which is impossible by definition) or the world becoming too complex for most (or all) people to understand (which probably already happened).

Or old things. Such as Ignorance.

Sources and Citations

[1] citation out of context from: The Debate over Family Law Reform in Pakistan In: J.J. Donoghue/ J.L. Esposito, Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives. 2nd Ed. (Oxford University Press 2007) 209

[2] as defined in his introduction: Ch. Witschel, Krise — Rezession — Stagnation? Der Westen des römischen Reiches im 3. Jahrhundert n. Chr. Frankfurter althistorische Beiträge (Bd. 4) (Frankfurt am Main 1999)

(I hope you understand German)