We Are Here. We Are Now. And We Can’t Change That.
No matter what side you’re on, you’re probably wrong.
Many years ago, I made a decision that caused plenty of friction between me and some people very close to me. What I decided was to distance myself from politics. I had had enough.
I grew up very close to politics. One of my very first jobs as a teenager (yeah, before I became a protestant pastor) was to join political rallies and to document every relevant moment in writing. An untrained journalist if you will. Back then, my mom had a relatively prominent position within the Secretary of Education in Mexico and one of her friends was the head of one of the rising political parties. Presidential elections were closing in that year and my mom’s friend offered me that job. I took it and spent months traveling throughout the state, accompanying all kinds of politicians and writing about them, including a famous ex-footballer and the presidential candidate. It was surreal.
Revelation número uno.
Despite my early entry into the political arena, politics never interested me as a career. But I became very passionate about discussing political topics. I invested a lot of energy, mental resources, and time debating political topics with countless individuals. All those discussions rarely amounted to much. And, after much pondering, it eventually became clear to me that, once political viewpoints are set in one person, it takes an incredibly large number of discussions and a very long time to have a minuscule chance to change someone’s mind. Any one debate or discussion has pretty much a zero probability to move them one inch. There had to be a better way.
Revelation número dos.
As I worked like a madman on a plan to crack the code of political conversions, a question came to me that led me to a second and much bigger revelation: why was I so sure that my own beliefs were right? The thing is that I had been a pastor already. And I had already left the church. I had walked away from my faith. That most deeply rooted belief of mine, a belief ingrained in me since childhood and one for which I would have given my life some years before, had gone from life purpose to being simply wrong for me. If my perspective on such a belief could have changed so much, my array of political viewpoints could surely use some questioning and probing.
This is killing us, man
The point of it all is that our political standpoints are killing our world and that no matter which side of the fence you’re on, you’re probably wrong. Again, I’m not a political writer and this is not a political piece. I just want to help you take a moment to think. We just began the year and things are already super crazy. The change of the year is, of course, symbolic and it doesn’t reset all the problems in our world. But we, the humans inhabiting this planet, can use the symbolism of the change to take a beat.
Things happen all the time. And every time something happens, people take sides and make it all worse. In 2016, we had the most intense part of the refugee crisis in Europe. I lived in Vienna back then and, I tell you, it was a very angry year for a lot of people. The problem is that anger increases susceptibility to misinformation. Angry humans lose their ability to reason and they lose their ability to be empathetic. No surprise we are where we are. The age of information is the age of anger. Ergo, the age of information is the age of misinformation. Mic drop.
Back in 2016, I wanted to write an ironic article titled How to Fail at Political Activism, but I never did. I intended to help people see that all those efforts to fight and defend their political cause keep fracturing the skeletal structure of our society. But I got distracted by other things and never got past this rough outline:
How to Fail at Political Activism
1. Address your opponents as dumb, ignorant, or plain stupid
2. Process information with your emotions and not with your intelligence
3. Nitpick facts, then use them to manipulate others
4. Never make a fair comparison
5. Marry your opinions until death do you part
The reality, as much as we might not want to see it, is that most of those people who believe the opposite of what we believe are good people. They are just as good as we are. If you don’t see it it’s because you simply never took the time to truly understand why they believe what they believe. You never took the time to understand their fears. You never took the time to see that some of your beliefs are hurting them. And you never took the chance to, after listening to them with sincerity, work out an approach to a common good. Instead, you just took your own belief and decided that anyone who believes the opposite must be a moron. Hey, I used to think that way too.
I invite you to drop political activism in 2021. I’m in no way saying to stop caring about your city, your country, and our world. I’m inviting you to do it differently this year. Look again at those five principles above. Ask yourself what would happen if this year you would do the exact opposite every time you feel the need to fight for your political standpoint.
Look around the world now. Look where the current approach has brought us. This is killing us, man.
A mrprose.com publication.
