I came across the following twitter thread the other day:
https://twitter.com/kitten_beloved/status/1519339931138609153
"I just can't understand how anyone could think [opinion shared by hundreds of millions]"
Congratulations, you have a common form of mind-blindness caused by ideological insularity
Don't worry, help is on the way, you can get better, let's get started
This thread is about understanding your ideological enemies. I agree with this thread. Understanding your enemies is incredibly important. It’s incredibly important if you want to be able to fight them effectively. It’s also incredibly important if you want to make sure that you’re on the right side in the first place. It’s a thread worth reading.There is, however, one issue with it. It’s not very well suited towards the audience who most needs to read it.
"But won't understanding my enemies make it harder to crush them, what if I start liking them"
On the contrary, understanding one's enemies is a vital first step on the path to getting their necks under your jackboots, forever
Developing feelings is rare!
What you're currently lacking is a theory of mind about your enemies, which means you are frequently surprised when their behavior contradicts your model of them
That's no fun, nobody likes being wrong constantly
So let's get better, progress through the stages with me
This kind of rhetoric won’t play very well with people who don’t already want to understand their enemies. Getting your enemies’ “necks under your jackboots” might be a figuratively correct description of what their motives are. However that’s not the way they think of it. It just sounds so oppressive when you put it that way. They almost never want to oppress people into agreeing with them. However, these enemies are an exception. They’re a special brand of evil. They’re so obviously selfish and/or hateful that it’s immoral to even try to rationalize their views. How can it possibly not be immoral to try to justify murder, slavery, bigotry, and exploitation of the poor?
At least that’s how they see it.
It’s a problem if your audience does not agree with your characterization their motives. They expect to know their own motives better than you, and a disagreement about their motives might lead them to assume that you’re not worth listening to. I also suspect that they don’t frequently feel surprised by their enemies. People who don’t want to understand their enemies often don’t behave like they frequently feel surprised by their enemies. In fact they seem to behave in the opposite way. This is probably due to confirmation bias, which makes what they do see feel like it reinforces their existing beliefs. This is another statement that doesn’t match their worldview, and it will further advance their distrust of you.
The audience of people who don’t want to understand their enemies, isn’t going to respond well to this thread, but there is an audience who will: People who do place value in understanding their enemies. I’m sure Kitten_beloved is aware of this fact. In fact, I suspect that the real target audience here is probably rationalists. There are multiple pieces of rationalist jargon in the thread. I’m sure that rationalists like it, but that’s kinda preaching to the choir.
I see this issue often when people comment about about censorship, cognitive empathy, or the marketplace of ideas. People criticize things like ending friendships over “disagreements”. However the word “disagreements” doesn’t rightly capture the emotion people feel when they end their friendships. To them, the people they “disagree with” actively want to cause harm. They roll their eyes when what they’re experiencing is described as mere “disagreement”. For a contemporary example of this, just look what people are saying about Pro-Palestine activists.
If you want a certain demographic to be your audience, and you want to appeal to them, then you need to recognize where their mindset currently is, and work from there. You will need to validate that they’ve likely experienced, and then explain how those experiences are consistent with your view of the world. Only then, can you effectively make the positive case for why your position is correct. Otherwise, they’re going to dismiss your point out of hand, because to them, what you're saying appears to defy their own reality. When appealing to a certain audience, you should do your best to make sure that you can make sense of their worldview. If it doesn’t make sense to you, then you’re at risk of misunderstanding it. Having a faulty understanding of your audience’s worldview will derail your connection with them almost as much as writing for a different audience will.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are different problems if you give them too much validation. They might just nod along with what you’re saying, and not realize that there’s anything about themselves that they have to change. You have to strike the best balance you can. Finding the right balance can be very difficult, after all, you’re trying to introduce them to a new way of thinking.
And I do apologize to kitten_beloved for picking on this particular thread. It’s far from the worst example of this. Most politicians are way worse. Making arguments that appeal to the audience that doesn’t need them might as well be the language that most politicians speak. This thread just happens to be thing that sparked my inspiration to write about the topic.
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Notes -
Just sounds like a typical ironic joke to me.
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