Well, only from Polar Certainty to Developing Some Deep Delicious Doubt,
By Matthew Hill 
When I started my quest to reintroduce dialogue and debate between people with polar opposite positions, I wanted to share methods that would flip people from one polarity to the other. That was wrong, and it was never going to work either. My mission now, with these pieces, is to take people from chanting slogans that they don’t fully understand and being manipulated by activists extremists who are using them as fodder, to enabling people to fill in the underpinnings of their own position by themselves, activating their own intelligence, so making them accountable and ready to have a civilised discussion with another RHA – Responsible Human Adult. A Global growth in rationality will not be seen in a mass change of polarity, but it will be witnessed when we see people freeing themselves from their unthinking loyalty to a cult, to releasing themselves to become independent thinkers, when we see people doing the work, and building their own understanding of a topic, based on accessing wider sources of information, data and facts, and them being willing to be held responsible for their informed views and facing the world with courage and wisdom.
Symptoms
Where are you now? Do you feel that you might be in the captured cluster? It is pretty easy to find out. When your chosen topic comes up with a member of the other side, how many of the following do you do?
*Interrupt, *emote, *attempt to shut them down with single words – e.g. X-phobe, or X-ist, *react quickly with slogans, *talk in the present tense having erased most of the history and context, or *feel feelings of aggression or even hate.? Total __/6
If you had any of these symptoms then, I’m sorry to say, you have been captured within an ideology, and were probably inducted by activist extremists, directly or via the one-sided algorithm of social media.
Cause
So why are many millions of people open to this? And why has it perhaps happened to you? Algorithm – Your preferred social media platforms wish to have you engage, hang around and hold your eyeballs to the screen. They do this through promoting content that causes controversy, stimulates short-term dopamine hits, and in short riles you up by conjuring up an enemy avatar to hate on, and then inviting you in to join and belong to an ever-growing tribe of like-minded people.
You don’t even mind being wrong as long as you can belong.
Social pressure
If your institution or generation have been captured, then it is much easier as a 21-year-old or a new employee to go along with the masses. Easier than facing isolation, loneliness and exclusion.
Financial pressure
If you are trapped in the gigging economy for a comedy wage of £12.21 an hour and you must magically come up with your share of the rent – £700 plus bills every month, then you have no choice but to go along with the loudest voices in the room and play along. Not to do so risks starvation, homelessness or going back home as an adult with your head hanging low. When cancellation fever was at its peak, expulsion for non-compliance with the heard became a real possibility for 1000s of people.
Mass movements
It is much easier to be an assumption-taker than a decision-maker.
Ripe for capture
Many people have come to London to find their fortune, only to struggle and end up making many compromises just to survive. And moving out from the parental home or graduating from university and finding your degree is not the key to your preferred employment choice comes as a brutal shock. You are lonely, broke and suffering from stress and anxiety. That is when you are most vulnerable to activist recruitment tactics, communications that draw you in with their siren call of simplified meaning and warm belonging…to a cult.
How Can I Help?
So, here we are, inside a polar group, and your friendships and income depend on you staying in. I get it. And I don’t want to jeopardise that. This is the interesting bit. Every cult and ideology must have a rump or core that is reasonable, beneficial and fundamentally true. It is at the extremes that the danger lies. The BLM organisation, the DEI agenda, Climate, Abortion, Assisted Dying, Trans, Education, Reparations, Gaza, Russia Ukraine, Immigration, Housing, Universal Income, Red v Blue, Capitalism, The traditional family, Religions, Army Conscription, and 100 other topics.
The point is not the topic but the approach you take to forming your opinion.
Test,
Take your most passionate subject from the list above or the thing that you are most revved up about that isn’t on the list. Great. Write down or record the main points of your argument – symptoms, causes and the main injustices. Articulate why the other side are wrong, and what your strategy would be for sorting the problem out. Great. That should have been relatively easy.
Now comes the clever bit
It can be quite helpful to go and move and stand two metres away facing where you just were and to begin to argue with the ghost of you, over there where you just stood, or find another piece of A4 paper and write down the case for the opposite point of view. Cover the same elements as you just did for your side of the debate but now do this from the new side, the opposite side. Do so sincerely, completely giving up your own point of view for the duration of the exercise, doing so with empathy and intellectual rigour, so that you truly represent what the other side would really say.
Light warning – Your emotions and brains will tell you repeatedly to stop, sabotage this effort, or spin it to weaken the other side’s case. If you cannot resist these urges, then you are fully fully captured! If you can calmly and in a dispassionate way argue a reasonable case for the opposite side, then you are… NOT CAPTURED. You are an RHA, a reasonable human adult! You have now proven that you are a deeper thinker, a skilled reflector and have now considered much more of the case and are a worthy intellectual. Great.
Get talking to another Reasonable Human Adult
Now, put this to good use. Go find someone on the other side and have an RHA, a reasonable human adult conversation with them. You will be amazed at the difference – no interruptions, now blow ups, respect, no slogans, no one-word put downs, referencing a fuller context, and all this with empathic listening. This should lead to a richer and more enjoyable exchange and the moulding of mutually enhanced wisdom, the building of synergy and maybe, an outcome with some workable and inclusive solutions. Wey hey, you’ve done it!
Action
I hope you have enjoyed this piece and now feel inspired. If you did the exercise, can I ask you a favour? Spread the word! Thanks,
Leave a Reply