Third Installment
Chapter 3: Prepare for Battle
Chapter 3 (0:00 - 4:31): Joshua and Matthew lay out a Battle Plan.
Abridged Transcript highlights:
(1:03) What can you say to these people?
(1:24) “Your goal is to be listened to.”
(3:12) If your frame is “us/them,” you’ve already lost.
(4:03) “The point IS the [universal] symmetry.”
(0:00) Joshua: Very helpful, thank you. All right, so suppose I am having a conversation with a family member, and they start [their diatribe] in front of another family member who agrees with them—or friend, this is going to be very common to those of us who have liberals that we know in our lives! They will often talk about their commiserations with one another in front of us—they’ll say things like, “Things are just so dark and depressing right now. I mean, we have basically a literal coup being run by the richest man in the world, and it’s just awful and terrible. How can people be okay with this?”
(0:38) Then they’ll say, “And it’s even worse, because there’s, like, a blitzkrieg of executive orders that are just trying to destroy democracy, and it’s just so awful and terrible! And they’ve literally taken a page out of the Nazis! And did you see Elon literally did a fascist salute? This is who these people are! We’ve gotta stop them!” “Yeah,” the other person says.
(1:03) Okay, and you’re listening to this! What might you say to these two people in this conversation you’re witnessing, that’s happening in front of you at the table, let’s say?
(1:12) Matthew: Sure. Well, it depends on the situation a little. Because if you're dealing with more than one person, it tends to escalate into sort of a brawl, you know, where no one's actually listening to anything.
(1:24) Your goal is to be listened to. So in that case I might suggest saying “Okay, I see where you're coming from. How are you going to handle the millions of people who disagree with you? What's your plan for that?” And I’ll just open there.
(1:41) And by the way, I want to drop this in, you'll appreciate this little anecdote. This is from a number of years ago. It was a conversation—after some, I think, a Christmas church gig, somewhere in central Missouri—with a very lovely bass player. And she said to me all these years ago, in perfect sincerity, “The trouble with conservatives is they just don't think!”
(2:06) And for this audience, what I would like to point out is the striking symmetry of that observation!
(2:16) Everyone, at this point, has had the experience of being under who they consider to be a horrible, awful President doing terrible things to the country. So there's all the empathy in the world for that. We actually all know what it feels like by now.
(2:33) The specific [complaint]s are unique to each individual—what the problem is, who the problem is, how bad the problem is—but everyone has them. And there is a very, very interesting symmetry going on here. And one of the tells that there is a deep symmetry—I like to phrase it like this: “Everybody reflexively sorts the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ but no two people do it exactly the same way.”
(3:02) To me, [the obvious presence of a universal symmetry] is a screaming tell that there is some deep mechanism [buried in our decision-making] that’s actually universal, that’s been overlooked. And that’s actually where I focus a lot of my energies.
(3:12) So where this boils down is, if I begin my counterattack from a position of us/them, I've instantly lost, and made it worse.
(3:27) If I make it about “liberals and conservatives,” or, you know, “viola players and violin players,” or anything, any division at all, I've already lost! Because it’ll be taken as an “us/them” attack.
(3:42) What I'm going to do, every time, is when something comes up, I'm going to deliberately and politely reframe what was said in terms of human universals: “Yeah, that's what they were saying about you guys, what do you think we should do about that?”
(3:59) [If they come back with] “Yeah, but we're the right ones, and they're wrong!” [then I simply counter with] “Yeah, they said that too. Now what do we do?”
(4:03) You know, you just keep turning it back, and turning it back. The point IS the [universal] symmetry.
(4:09) There is an argumentative technique that I’ve been trying to develop. And it’s the sort of thing that I hope will percolate upward through Twitter and find powerful people who can spread it (I'm not that leveraged myself, and I'm a very slow writer, so it takes a long time to get these things going). But,
(4:29) This is the idea...
(4:31) END OF CHAPTER 3
[Next up: a deep dive on “How to Solve Argument.”]
Links:
full-length Twitter Spaces, the original audio, hosted by Joshua Lisec
full-length copy on YouTube, uploaded by Matthew Pierce
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Overview
Chapter 3: Prepare for Battle (you are here)
Stay tuned for further installments.