have you ever changed someone's mind?
on the lost art of persuading
When I was about 15 or 16, we had a religious studies teacher at my school called Mr. Haines. He was famous for being pretty strict—the entire class had to stand behind their chairs with their blazers on (always a point of contention), being quiet, before any of us were allowed to sit down—but this brought him a great level of respect, because it was clear there was no shit with him. He was pretty funny, when you behaved, and genuinely interested in educating the kids in front of him. It wasn’t a religious school so our RE lessons, what they’d now call Religious and Moral Education, were more about learning what all the world’s major religions believed and how people practiced them, and what ethical questions arose from the practice of those religions.
One afternoon Mr Haines told us that we were going to have a debate in the class. It would be on the topic of abortion. He asked us to raise our hands if we were in support of abortion rights, then he moved all of us with raised hands to one side of the room. We turned to face our friends and peers on the other side. Now, Mr Haines said, here’s the important detail: we would be having a class debate about abortion rights, he said, but each side would be arguing for the other side’s position.
I think about this class a lot. It was a stroke of teaching genius, in a way; we were too young to have become entrenched and closed off, and this was several years before social media became real, so we hadn’t got used to the disembodied style of online arguing—devoid of empathy, all about pithy comments and instant gratification—that would shape us for the next two decades. We were used to disagreeing, and having different positions, but I can’t remember a time before this when I’d been forced to take the position of my opposite—in another situation, you might say my enemy—in order to try and succeed.
The fact that it was our friends and peers on the other side of the aisle meant that we were already primed for compassionate reflection on how they might have come to take stances we disagreed with; these weren’t devils (well, some were), but people we spent all day every day with, people we had known for years. It was easier to imagine their intentions than those of a stranger. We were of an age where this particular issue was largely theoretical, so we weren’t bringing any of our own pain or direct experience to it. But it was an issue that was meaningful and important, something that might really affect our lives in the future.
I can’t remember how the debate went down, but what I can remember is that I had to ask myself, sincerely: why does this person think what they think? Not on a surface level, but on a deeper level? What are they afraid of, or worried about, or who are they thinking of when they come to this position? What about the world makes them hold this opinion? If you wanted to win the debate, you couldn’t just recite the arguments, but needed to understand where they came from. It was an incredible lesson in both radical empathy and strategic thinking. The intention of the teacher was not to convince us that one opinion or the other was correct; it would have been inappropriate for him to do so. What he was trying to impress upon us is that if you really want to understand why people hold positions, and why they think something which is diametrically opposed to what you believe to be correct, you have to engage with their reasoning—and to do this, you have to engage with who they are, where they come from, what forces are at work on them and what they gain—or risk—from believing one thing or another.
After this class, which I found ludicrously stimulating, Mr Haines took me to one side and asked if I’d considered studying philosophy when we all went off to college. I hadn’t; I never knew anyone who had studied it, I didn’t really know what it was or what it entailed. But I went away and did some research, and when I started at college a year or so later I had enrolled in Philosophy—and it just about changed my life.
A lot of us at the moment are thinking about discourse, and division, and how things have become as bad as they currently appear to be. The right is on the rise, our supposedly left-wing politicians are centrists, the Overton window will not shift in our direction and there are a terrifying number of fascist talking points influencing global policy. The one single thing that all of us seem to agree on, ironically, is that society is more polarised than it seems to have been before, at least within our lifetimes. Theories abound as to why this is—with the internet being blamed extensively, and probably accurately—and the dominant reason changes according to who is speaking. We can be rational and theoretical as we like in these moments, but none of us online today are above throwing our toys out of the pram publicly when we are upset, or annoyed, or scared, or just plain angry; every time an election happens we prove that yet again. In these moments we decry everyone else, attribute nothing but malicious intent to everyone who doesn’t vote how we do and further isolate ourselves from the very people who we would need to influence if we ever wanted to change the political landscape (a project against which the odds are already stacked, by the media and much else). It is, of course, understandable to be angry when your side loses, to rage and hate and dismiss your opponents when there is so much at stake. But is it in any way helpful?
A couple of years ago, while I was working at a union, I took a free course run by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the American union organiser Jane McAlevey, who passed away too young earlier this year. I had read Jane’s book A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy in 2021, when we were in the flurry of antifascist reading groups and trying to work out whether things would—or could—ever get any better, and I found it galvanising. In it, Jane tackled all the main US myths about unionising labour—that it’s old fashioned, corrupt, ineffective, etc—and dismantled them, working to change her readers’ minds. This is what she had done throughout her career, first winning huge victories as an organiser within specific unions, and then as someone training organisers to build worker power and do the same within their workplace structures.
The course, called Organizing for Power, focused more on workplace organising in a traditional sense than in broad political building, but had a lot of insight for people concerned with how to shake us out of the situation we’re currently in. One of the guiding ideas was that in order to achieve any kind of union win you needed to build a supermajority—that is, you needed to get almost everybody on board. There are a lot of laws about what a union can and can’t do, and how it can operate, and these are different in different countries, but broadly a majority is always required, within a union, to go ahead with any action. Within Jane’s theory of change, the key to achieving a majority, then a supermajority, and then eventually going on a 100% strike—the strongest possible action, with the highest odds of winning whatever specific demand the workers had made—was the ability to change people’s minds.
I don’t mean, by this, that the workers had to convince the bosses. This isn’t the case. In a capitalist system you are unlikely to be able to convince your boss to be able to give you the raise (or the maternity cover, or the sick pay) that might undercut their profit margins. No—that’s what the strike is for, because that shows the power that the workers have, and stops production until the workers’ demands have been met. The people that need to be convinced are the workers who either don’t think they have that power, don’t think it’s worth exercising it, don’t believe in the union, don’t believe in the action, or are too afraid to join in.
What the organisers needed, we were told, was not only a real, tested understanding of the power structures at play—a clear and effective strategy to achieve specific goals—but also the ability to approach and discuss with people who may be hostile to their ideas, and to meet these people where they were, without judgment or disdain. It is no good, as an organiser, going to a non-unionised worker and telling them off for not behaving correctly, or for inaction, or treating them as stupid. They would simply never move from their position, and without them you wouldn’t get a supermajority. Without the supermajority, nothing could be achieved. The key skill to really effect change was the art of convincing, over and above everything else. And at the heart of the ability to convince is the ability to listen, to empathise, to understand and to offer alternative solutions.
As Jane McAlevey puts it, in the resources for the Organizing for Power course:
We must spend most of our time listening to people—not talking to or at them.
On the modern left we have become incredibly good at berating people who might otherwise be our allies, and demonising them, and a lot less good at listening to the underlying concerns of people who hold opposite or incongruent views to ours. Some of this is the dopamine-triggering of righteous indignation; we get off on telling people that they’re wrong and we’re right. In the UK at least, some of this is a completely understandable response to having laboured for so long under a neoliberal social structure first ushered in by Thatcher. The dismantling of the state, as a support system, has been long, its effects on living standards has been demoralising, and consent for it has been manufactured by both the right wing and liberal media for as long as I have been alive. It’s really hard to want to give a shit about what people really think when you have to not only see racist / sexist / xenophobic / ableist / anti-queer rhetoric on the front pages of the Daily Mail, but also have to listen to the exact same rhetoric spew almost verbatim from people’s mouths on TV, on the radio, in the street and at work. It’s tiring, hearing it over and over. It’s exhausting, in fact.
Into this already overwhelming environment, social media was introduced, and eventually became formulated to appeal to our worst traits and our least empathetic tendencies. Alongside this, over and over again, we were told that we had to sit down with, be friends with, be polite to people who held sociopathic views, and told that civilised debate was more important than what someone was actually advocating for or putting in place. “Civility” was demanded from us while politicians brought in laws that demeaned us, made our lives more difficult, rolled back our hard-won rights and furthered the endless “enshittification” of everything. The demand for civility is in itself a form of control.
I do not believe that you should be able to sit down with a fascist and have a nice meal; I don’t subscribe to that idea that your friendship group should include people who vote for parties that are hostile to you personally, a marginalised group specifically or the country as a whole. I don’t believe in demanding non-violence from the horrendously oppressed and I don’t think you should have to be polite to people who believe you are worthless. This isn’t a conversation about deradicalisation, which is a worthwhile but difficult process that often puts people at risk; some people will never shift their position, because it is rooted in hate more than anything else. I don’t think that disagreement can ever be ‘just politics’, because politics is everything, it defines every part of our lives. I don’t want to be friends with people whose values are wildly different from my own, and who vote one way or another for racist reasons, or exhibit politics that disregard the lives and needs of others. But what I do believe is that on the left, we are really losing, politically, and we seem to be losing more aggressively every day. The world is sliding the right in the most terrifying ways—and in the places where the left are winning, we either ignore them or have contempt for them, or the knowledge is withheld from us altogether. If we are going to do something about that, we need to learn some lessons and change the way we are doing things. And part of that is going to be listening—really listening—to the genuine concerns of people we don’t like, who don’t agree with us, in order to at least try to change their minds in a way that might actually work.
I don’t mean that you should sit down with people who hate you. I’m not saying that you, in particular, have to do anything. But what I am suggesting is that we all have the ability to really effect at least one person’s view of the world, and invite them over into our way of seeing this in a manner that is genuinely rooted in a deep empathy for them, as people. I know this because I have seen this process work. A friend of mine—someone I’ve known for 20 years now, someone who I adore—used to vote in a way I never would have voted. We would have political conversations all the time, clashing horns, arguing in fact, and slagging each other off afterwards. These disagreements went on for a decade and a half. As we both got a bit older, we realised that our struggles, as adults under austerity, were similar ones, and that softened us both up; we listened a bit better. I probably didn’t notice when her perspective started to shift, but eventually I found that we were on similar ground more often, and she was much more open to reading books I had mentioned, and eventually she was coming to me with left-wing news and content and her voting track shifted. By the time of the last election, she was the one engaging with her bosses and colleagues when they said untrue things about what the effects of left-wing policies would be; she was the one changing their minds. The same has happened to me, thanks to people who presented me with things I hadn’t considered, or gave me new ways of looking at problems I thought I had the answers to; I moved further left as well.
In fact, this has happened a lot, if I think about it, and I think if you look, you’ll see it’s happened to you. I’ve changed people’s minds, and I’ve had my mind changed. None of this involved someone berating me and telling me I was awful, or telling me not to speak to them ever again if I hadn’t performed in a way they thought wasn’t perfectly correct. Instead, it involved someone understanding our shared problems, modelling a different way of being, and showing me what was positive about that. It involved them challenging my way of thinking gently, with the possibility of making life better for myself and the people around me—with the possibility of being a better force in the world, towards the ideals that I already hold. I’ve been made curious to learn the things that other people have learned, to change my mind in the way that their minds have been changed, and those people have created the foundations upon which I might make that change myself. Whether or not these people actually gave a shit about me, or whether they thought I was a total idiot with risible views, one thing is inarguable: what they did was effective. I changed.
A few years ago, Youtuber Contrapoints (otherwise known as Natalie Wynn) was interviewed on Offline with Jon Favreau about how she had managed to reach across the aisle and alter the perspective of so many young right-wing men, despite being, on paper, what so many of them hate. A former philosophy PhD candidate, Natalie started out making funny, well-researched, highly philosophical videos primarily about the rise of the newish alt-right. She would sneak in classical philosophy in the middle of joking about her own sexual kinks, using humour that would appeal to both the shit-posting left and the 4chan-pilled right; she transitioned in front of the world and showed her left-wing politics through all of it (not without making some highly-criticised choices and being demonised by her own ‘side’ more than once). But she also took seriously the position that men seduced by the alt-right found themselves in, was not above self-mockery or self-critique, and often presented her videos as faux-debates between a series of characters in order to properly consider the positions of the men she was talking about. Her understanding of their real concerns and problems was core to this approach. As she put it to Jon Favreau:
The importance of reason has been grossly overstated when it comes to people changing their minds…. Making people feel like you kind of see where they’re coming from on some level is this kind of entry point. You have to get people to lower their defences before they’re even open to reason.
She went on to say that her manner and framing in the videos was intended to say ‘I’m not here to scold you’ to these men, and that such a position ‘opens them up to your way of thinking’. And she really did achieve a change in her viewers; her videos are full of comments from people saying how she had influenced their way of thinking. I have had conversations about her videos with people that had never really thought about trans rights before, or never understood the issues. She is, like us all, imperfect and fallible. But she has achieved more effective change than many of us will ever manage. And I think there’s something we can learn from that.
While political strategy is complex and debatable, and the issues of policy are an endless problem, the simple goal of persuasion is one we can all commit to, on some level or another. Whether its door-knocking for your town’s Green councillor next time local elections come around, having a conversation with your problematic uncle around the dinner table, or arguing more effectively next time you disagree with a friend, there are always opportunities to shift your tactics to ones rooted in empathy, in an understanding of the position of your opponent as a fellow human searching for answers and simply finding them in the wrong place. You have to convince people that your answers, not theirs, will truly solve the problems in their lives. You have to give them evidence, but you have to help them understand it too. And most of all, you need to make them feel heard so they’ll open up to your ideas, instead of shutting them down and proving all their worst assumptions about you, as a leftist.
It comes down to this: we are all in agreement, I think, that the current situation is intolerable. We are all being hurt as the standards of living in this country decrease, as our wages diminish, as our bills go up. If we are marginalised or vulnerable, things are worse by an order of magnitude. Things need to change. And who do we want to listen to, when looking for guidance? Organisers with decades of experience of building power to win, who tell us that listening with empathy and taking people’s feelings and concerns seriously is the best way to make change, or our own impulses to sit on the internet thinking the worst of humanity and deciding that everyone who disagrees with us is inherently evil? The former seems to me to be rooted in the exact hopefulness that is needed for a radical politics; the latter seems inherently hopeless.
My next novel Carrion Crow—a dark, physical book that ‘deduces an unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender from the pages of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management’—is forthcoming in Feb 27th 2024. You can support me, and this substack, by pre-ordering it here:
You nailed it. It's very difficult to change a landscape if you don't understand it.
My mum frequently, with clear pride and love for him, tells me of growing up having arguments ("discussions") with her dad and at the end of them, when they'd both be ready to storm off, he'd make her argue again but taking the other side. I don't know if I'd have loved it at the time but I love, now, the idea of debate being a bigger (mandatory?) part of the curriculum.