If faced with critical thinking, people tend to disregard what you’re trying to say and push back to their outlook.
Your title is un-self critical and condescending, so your conversations probably aren’t terribly productive in either direction.
That turn of phrase has never been used by someone conversing in good faith and with an open mind.
Edit: Jack Nicholson excepted
On one hand people often don’t like to hear bad news or an idea that means they have to do a thing or face a problem. On the other hand how a person is told the idea is a big part of a negative reaction. Often there is no reason to tell someone the thing at all.
I’ll be straight forward if someone asks but I’m not “brutality honest”. OP sounds like the “brutality honest” without anyone asking type.
Seriously, that title is worded like a straight up attack. Such a question, while open ended in who would consider what truth, still leads to the same outcome: engagement based purely on outrage and “proving the other side wrong.”
I sometimes wonder if people post things like this with the intention of filtering through comments to block people that post their political viewpoints in response. If thats the case, I would conssider this a very effective and intelligent post. However, I don’t think that this is the case.
Not sure if this is helpful, but my take is:
Because in most cases, what is assumed to be “truth”is subjective. If you’re talking political. More often things are blurred with regards to truth as most things tend not to be empirically true, but instead, emotionally true.
For example;
“All conservatives are Nazis!”
This is inherently untrue. Yet I see every day- people who believe this to be the absolute truth. Same thing with-
“All liberals want to do is make our children gay!”
Also untrue. But when you try and correct them, they will almost always entrench themselves within their own version of the truth and disregard any form of critical thinking.
This is why asking questions is important. All conservatives are Nazis may actually be true if the person merely equates conservatives with Nazis, the proposition a mere tautology. Same for liberals trying to make kids gay, where people who make kids gay are liberals.
And by asking questions, trying to understand someone else, both parties can engage in critical thinking.
I think it’s wrong to think that critical thinking should spontaneously arise because someone’s beliefs are challenged. That’s never how it works. Rather, one person has to be vulnerable and ask, “What do you mean? Help me understand where you’re coming from.”
I have a friend who had surgery to become gay. He was a straight guy before the surgery, and now she is a lesbian.
That’s sort of exactly the point. People believe it to be true, and it’s sort of impossible to prove them wrong. Nature vs Nurture still isn’t proven either way, regardless of how strongly you feel one way or the other.
The simple fact that someone believes it’s possible to “make people gay”, almost necessarily leads to them believing there are people out there actively doing it.
Have you considered that they probably feel the same way about you? That you’re disregarding what they say and pushing back with your own outlook?
“I think it’s very easy to convince people they are wrong.”
“Actually, here’s all these studies that prove that the opposite is-”
“Well I don’t believe that.”
Humans are more influenced by emotions than logic, which means that critical thinking alone may not convince them. Only those who are receptive to logical reasoning can be persuaded.
