It has become increasingly difficult for me to figure out what people are trying to accomplish these days.  I get bogged down in the glamor displays I guess.  If somebody spends their time insulting people, even if the insults are particularly witty, and the choir being preached to claps thunderously with applause, it was never their intention to change the other parties’ mind.  When Hillary calls swing voters in key states a basket of deplorables, that right there is where she loses the election.  Not just the election, mind you.  That is also where her party lost the upcoming mid-term elections as well.  See, she didn’t offer them jobs.  She insulted and dehumanized them instead.  When her followers go on to call the people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump racist bigots, they lose yet more voters.

As for me, well, I didn’t vote for either evil, but that still doesn’t keep me safe from the dehumanizing declarations of those who declare that I put Trump in office!  I can only roll my eyes with disbelief.  My State’s outcome was never in doubt, and it went to Hillary, as it would.  So much shouting!  So much anger!  Do you really think that insulting my intelligence and morality is going to get me to change my actions?

That’s not how proper arguments change people’s minds.  First, we must understand that people do in fact change their minds over time with sufficient evidence.  People actually wash their hands now between the morgue and the birthing wing of the hospital.  A great number of people in the US used to be Christian, and now are not.  They changed their mind.  Why?  Evidence.  Or the lack thereof.  Neither insults nor love-bombing worked nearly as well as evidence.

Next, people seem to think that people’s opinions are now their tribal identity.  Divided and conquered so neatly, they are ushered into their social media echo chambers, made more comfortable by being surrounded by those like-minded individuals, and yet, and yet, they’re not really like-minded at all.

You are not your opinion.  How could you be?  Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m an anti-vaxxer.  I’m not, because my views are a hell of a lot more complicated and nuanced than a mere label could ever portray, but let’s pretend that I am.  A vaxxer comes up to me, and how do you think they try to convince me to vaccinate my child?  That’s right.  They insult me.  “You stupid person who just wants millions of babies to die horrible deaths, just get your child vaccinated already!”  This is obviously NOT the way to convince somebody to do something.

You want to know how the Anti-Vaxxers convince people?  Evidence.  They bring up hundreds of published studies in scientific journals.  And I do mean hundreds.  We’re not talking about oh Wakefield got retracted.  That’s nice.  But the other 10 studies which replicated his results using entirely different populations weren’t retracted.  Now, Anti-Vaxxers could use the same methods of insults that the Vaxxers do, and some of them do because immaturity of argumentation styles exists everywhere you go, but for the most part, they have done far more research than your typical Vaxxer has.  Like Atheists who know the Bible far better than most Christians do, of course the Anti-Vaxxer has done far more medical research paper reading than the typical Vaxxer has.

If you know full well that insults don’t work to convince people to change their mind, why are they so prevalent in use these days?  My best guess is that they’re tribal signaling.  They say, I’ve already argued this, my mind is made up, and since I know that you will defend your views to the death, I’m going to dehumanize you until you die instead of building bridges to accomplish a shared vision or goal.  This is why the world needs reenchanting by the way.  People are disconnected from the soil, from the plant kingdom, and from each other.  The only way you can connect with somebody who holds different views than you do, is to be able to share their viewpoint enough to acknowledge that you do still share values.  Life is still sacred.  Nobody wants children to die.  Nobody wants babies to die.  Nobody wants them to die from gun fire, from heart disease, from cancer.  Nobody wants them to die in warfare, from bombs, from defective car parts, from virulent illnesses.  You can’t see that if all you see is the pro-gun label on somebody’s forehead.

Take the labels off, and you get a father whose child died from a vaccine, and his neighbor whose child died from the flu.  You see their utter grief, and their desperation that another father won’t have to suffer the same agony.  Can you imagine the power that would occur if these two fathers got together, and said, we BOTH don’t want children to die.  What can we do to make vaccines safer, so that more parents are willing to take them, so that less children end up dead or irreparably vaccine-damaged for life who do take them?  But no, that can’t happen right now.  Instead we are herded into groups based on opinions.  But what if we could talk, and listen, and collaborate with each other to get what we really want, less dead children?  How can that even happen if I am totally right, and you’re just too stupid to see it because you are evilly evil with an extra helping of evil sauce on top and obviously want to murder as many children as possible?  Meanwhile, the pedophiles in top echelons of the government continue their predatory ways, same as it was in Rome.  We’re so busy fighting each other, the children continue to suffer and die.  The drone bombing in the Middle East continues.  The dumping of toxic and hazardous waste in the middle of the street in African and Asian countries where the children dig through the garbage for food to eat continues.  I’m starting to think that the evilly evil with extra evil sauce on top people are the people who argue endlessly instead of doing something to stop the evil they can.