“Convincing” people about the need for change
Question from the Internet:
“When I asked people how we can work through different perspectives regarding COVID in order to unite, most people responded by making disparaging remarks rather than suggesting empathetic/considerate solutions. Speaking in general terms, how can people with strong conflicting views successfully interact with each other?”
First of all, we need to understand that we are all very different, we all have very subjective, egocentric, self-serving, self-justifying viewpoints, and directly we will never be able to agree or convince each other about our own viewpoints.
In order to somehow cooperate, solve problems and survive together we need some collective, mutual incentive, some positive goals that can attract us.
We are simple creatures motivated either by pain or by pleasure.
If we don’t change voluntarily, building the crucially necessary mutually responsible, mutually complementing cooperation above everything that separates us, rejects us from each other, then increasing blows, deepening crisis and at the end intolerable suffering will “soften", convince us.
On the other hand we can already — with a small, critical mass of people that are more sensitive and willing to change themselves, to build the above mentioned mutual connections — start the process of adaptation to Nature’s fully integrated, interdependent system we can’t change, can’t escape from.
Then these pioneers will be able to pull the rest behind them when the rest starts softening as the general crisis all around the world — plagues, climate change causes extreme weather, socioeconomic collapse, water shortage, wars — will worsen.
Then we will have a classic “good cop/bad cop" scenario the crisis pushing us from behind, the positive example of the pioneers pulling is ahead.