Why Should You Care What I Say?
I have never been genuinely convinced about anything by being told I was wrong by someone I do not respect. If I respect someone who calls me out on my errors, then I take the critique seriously and try to improve. Even if I do not like someone or a specific position, respect must be earned and must come before implementing change based on their comments.
As a relatively basic example, my upcoming book is wrestling with the problem of evil. As a Christian, I do not believe the problem of evil disproves the existence of the Christian God. However, I take J.L. Mackie's formulation of the problem of evil seriously. I do not give the same level of credibility to a meme shared by an anonymous Twitter user. I disagree with Mackie, but I respect him enough as a philosopher to seriously engage his argument. If I were ever going to be convinced, it would be because of someone like him rather than someone on social media "owning Christian sheeple."
However, it is funny that we all think we are the exception to the rule I outlined above. We do not want to be told what to do by someone we do not respect, but we believe that other people, who may not respect us, are going to all of a sudden be convinced by that one spectacular piece of evidence that we just found in a Google search.
We clearly overestimate our own persuasiveness. We all believe that we can be influencers and change the minds of millions through our brilliant Facebook posts. Our TikTok will go viral, and everyone will care what we say. In reality, that will not happen for the vast majority of us. We talk about building platforms, and if you are blessed with a platform, I encourage you to use it wisely. However, most of us will try to build a platform and end up with a small circle of people who enjoy consuming what we produce. And there is nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
The problem with this dynamic is that our frustration begins when our audience's size does not grow with our ambitions. Some people, no matter how hard we try, will not listen to us. We cannot convince them to see the world our way. For whatever reason, we cannot earn enough of their respect to convince them to read what we have written or watch our YouTube video. They read the entire local newspaper every day, but they will not read a 500-word blog post written by their friend.
This can cause us to try to elevate our rhetoric. We think that if we failed to convince them the first time, maybe we can convince them by becoming more extreme. They were not listening before, but if I write that article with a provocative headline, they may click on it. If I create a shocking video exposé, even if the conclusion is not really that shocking, maybe people will want to follow me.
Everything returns to what I argued previously. We think that we are the exception to the rule. We think that we deserve respect from other people instead of having to earn it. We get frustrated, so we began to take more controversial steps to try to elevate our persuasiveness, but it ironically has a counterproductive effect. Like I said at the beginning of this piece, I have never been convinced to change my mind by anyone who simply tells me that I am a fool. At least for me, but I do not think I am alone; that kind of argumentation brings up my defenses and ironically makes me less likely to change my mind.
Do you ever look at our media and wonder why it seems like most of the talking heads represent the extreme positions of their political persuasions? I understand that conflict raises ratings which brings financial incentives, but I think it goes deeper than that. Rather than trying to earn the respect of all the people who do not see the world in the way we do, we just turn up our own volume. We break out the megaphone and shout down anyone who disagrees with us. Rather than have a rational, reasoned discussion that may be able to establish a degree of common ground, we go to verbal war.
Watching people shout at each other is unlikely to win my respect, so am I likely to change my mind on anything important? Probably not. But, again, they assume that they are so persuasive. We all overestimate our own persuasiveness.
This is a cultural critique, of course, but I think the solution to this problem comes from what I implied in the first paragraph. I talk a lot about someone. If any of us want to change hearts and minds, we cannot assume that our positions, degrees, titles, or anything else give us the right to tell people what to think. In fact, appealing to our perceived authority without showing the reasoning behind our positions will lead to resentment. It will make the situation worse. The only way that we will ever change minds about anything substantive is by proving to the world that we have something worth saying and earning their respect.