“The Persuaders” is Hopeful+
It Teaches You How to Fish
The very idea that people can change their mind is hopeful.
On the other hand, I’m not crazy about persuading, which smacks of manipulation. Don’t try your Jedi mind hacks on me, dude.
There are no Jedi mind hacks in this book. And really just one fundamental insight that everything else flows from: People want to make sense out of their experience and it’s very difficult. That’s it.
Most people aren’t jerks who will never let go of their deeply rooted jerky beliefs. Most people are confused and more than a little anxious about the sense of everything changing so fast.
I’m most people. I do not have a good explanatory model for what the heck is going on around me. I’m not even sure what the heck is going on around me.
I think most people’s vague idea, including mine, is that lots of complicated problems are coming to a head now, problems we’ve known about and put off. I think most people right now are, like, ‘uh oh, this is that time, when the shit hits the fan.’
Of course the shit has been hitting the fan for quite a while depending on where you accidentally happen to have been born, or what you look like, or what level of trauma life has sent your way. But now it feels like more and more of us are really up against it.
The previous three paragraphs are an example of bad messaging
Leading with a massive problem reinforces cynicism and despair. Why should i bother trying?
I did it anyway to show how naturally our communication goes off the rails and becomes counterproductive before we even get started.
The problem with problems is they don’t lead anyone to take action because most people are already juggling too many problems as it is.
You’d think that telling people clearly about all the awful shit would get them to do something about it, but it doesn’t. It has the opposite effect. Dwelling on the horrors reinforces their strength and boosts people’s sense of hopelessness.
‘What you fight, you feed,’ (attributed to Anat Shenker-Osorio in ‘The Persuaders’).
I think many people have begun to realize that information by itself is not persuasive. So what is?
The people Anand Giridharadas writes about know that some, maybe most, beliefs can be changed with the right approach, that beliefs are often much more lightly held than they appear.
I am not interested in trickery or in emotional appeals to a past that never was and neither is Giridharadas.
That leaves one option that works. Meeting people where they are as humans. Most people think of themselves as basically good and trying their best most of the time. Trying hard to figure out what is going on and how to feel about it.
I know I am.
I think joining people in the honest situation of trying hard in a screwed-up world is where connection can start.
I am fortunate to have hosted free public events weekly for several years on the topics of death and loss. These are universal themes, for rich or poor, red or blue. I have seen how much we have in common and how deep our shared values are underneath the apparent differences.
Shared experiences and values lead to openness and receptivity, which can lead to new beliefs.
People need help making meaning out of what happens to them in their life. If we share some basic values and have some common experiences, there’s a chance we can help each other figure out how to feel and where the meaning is.
Forming a belief or having an opinion about something is almost never simple. We have conflicting emotions. It’s an internal wrestling match. We want to say, “it all depends … “
I assume that everyone’s beliefs are works in progress, including my own, no matter how they are represented externally. The Berlin Wall didn’t look like it would ever fall down.
When we join people’s internal wrestling match with our own, instead of some agenda we’re pushing, we can try to make sense together.
What does that even mean, “to make sense.” I think it means something like, having a way to look at things that feels familiar and right. When things aren’t making sense, it’s because all the stuff going on doesn’t fit into a recognizable pattern or frame.
I don’t want to change people’s minds. I want to be with people where we just keep figuring out things together and probably never have a final Belief.
This Has Not Been a Book Review
What I have written is a summary of what spoke to me about ‘The Persuaders.”
The author and the people he writes about are interested in changing minds — and not through shallow emotional appeals — through meeting people on the basis of shared values, as I described.
The people he writes about are political people:
Linda Sarsour, Loretta Ross. Alicia Garza
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Anat Shenker-Osorio, Diane Benscoter, John Cook, Steve Deline
All of these people are to some extent devoted to winning elections. For them, the wrestling match needs to be decided, this-way or that-way, by a specific date. Then it’s on to the next match, trying to change some that-ways to this-ways.
They try to close the deal. I don’t.
They actively try to sow seeds of doubt among people leaning the-other-way. There are some very compassionate ways to do this. I don’t.
If I had a clear agenda to convert people toward, maybe I would be a better closer. But I don’t.
Unless it’s an agenda to want to keep talking with people about things that matter.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
