What do you do when people don't care?
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What would you like for them to do? Have they discussed how they vote with you? Or how they spend their money? Maybe they just don't want to talk about it at work?
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As someone in a similar environment, there are others who care. It just isn't worth the risk to my job & professional relationships to talk about. Most people who don't care I won't sway anyways and anyone who does care doesn't need to talk to me. So, for the betterment of my family, I stay quiet at work. Outside of work though I'll talk to my friends & anyone who will listen about the risks of the current regime.
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I think a better question is, how do we make our elected representatives care?
(The answer, of course, is by not electing a**holes, but that's not going to happen until people really start to suffer). -
It's less about valuing communication and more about the dopamine hit. Delivering that lecture and educating the simpletons feels really good.
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I wish I knew. People keep telling me to "organize" and "strike". Like yeah a Walmart full of 60yo conservative white people is going to strike over this, fucking idiot.
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Idk I listen to politics lectures. It's not really the lecturer's fault he was lecturing, he was right and so he should be lecturing others on truth.
This idea that all opinions are equal are how we ended up in a post-truth world.
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All anyone wants to do is lecture me about how they are right, and I am wrong if I think different than them
The question is - are you wrong? Is your take actually valid? Based on sound imperical data? Is not fallacious? Does your reasoning stand up to scrutiny?
Ultimately you shouldn't need to be coddled if you have any allegiance to the truth.
It's one thing if a 3-year old gets 2+2 wrong. It's another when it's a 33 year old.
The unfortunate reality is that democracy as a vehicle for progress is a failure because not enough people have an allegiance to the truth, nor have the basic epistemological tools for determining what's knowledge, what's belief, what's a hypothesis, what's theory or what's evidence or any idea of what the scientific method even is.
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Lecturing others anonymously online isn't exactly caring either.
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You have more control over your attitude than over politics, or other peoples' opinions. Don't exhaust yourself and don't strain your relationships uselessly. They want to bring you down and push you out. I usually reject stoicism, but this is a good time to be stoic and keep your energy reserves, and your attitude, fresh.
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The first thing I would ask is, have you made any attempts to really understand what motivates them and why they believe as they do? Given your flippant dismissal of their belief systems, I suspect you have just mentally bucketed them and, instead of really trying to understand them, you fall back on your per-conceived notions of what you think they believe. Without that understanding, you will never be able to "make people care", because you are not treating them as fully formed people with their own beliefs and priorities. You expect that, if you just yell at them loudly enough, they will come around. They won't and, if anything, they will just dig their heels in further. To them, you're this guy:
Not everyone has the same priorities you do. What you see as "the most important thing in the world" may fall much further down the list for someone else. They may not even see it in the same framing you do. Maybe they do care about your thing, but they have their own "most important thing" and if your thing and their thing are in contention, they are going to pick their thing. This is part of the reason we have politics in the first place, once you start dealing with other people and trying to decide what and how things should be prioritized and run, you are going to run into differing beliefs and priorities. It's why most government polices generally suck and don't get everything done. Because those policies are the result of compromise between people with different and often competing priorities. And yes, it may be that some of those other priorities come from bad information, though more often they will come from radically different base beliefs. And not understanding what those beliefs actually are means that you will not have any sort of basis for convincing them of anything.
Changing peoples' minds is hard. But, it starts from a place of understanding people and not dismissing their beliefs. Step back from your outrage for a moment and try to really get in their heads. You may not agree with their position, but you need to understand how they got there before you have any chance of getting them out of it. And, maybe you can't. It may just be that they have some foundational beliefs which are completely at odds with what you want to convince them of. But, if you know and understand that, it becomes much easier to walk away from the situation and not waste time and energy on a hopeless fight. And while it feels good to yell at people, that basically never works and only serves to push them further away.
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