Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

by 8 Comments

How To Persuade People in Politics

This post isn’t going to be about persuading people in the conventional political realm. For that, you should ask a politician. This post is about debating political ideas with people, whether in person or on the internet.

The first thing that you should know is that you’re unlikely to get someone to cede their position or their fundamental beliefs in the course of a discussion. People will tend to be less focused on whether or not their position is right and more on how they can show that they have the stronger position. Because they’re focused on that, rather than on figuring out what’s actually true or preferable, you’re unlikely to shift them much in the course of a discussion.

Emotions will also tend to run high in a debate. There are a couple ways to handle it depending on your objectives and the rules of conduct of a given discussion space. You can either be emotionally withdrawn, or you can use passionate expression to bowl over the other person’s position. What your personality is like and what the situation is should direct what method you choose to use.

What you can do is shift the beliefs of other people who might be watching the exchange. And you might be able to indirectly influence the beliefs of the person that you spoke with originally on a longer timeline than the course of a given discussion.

Knowing all this can save you a lot of frustration.

by 5 Comments

Economists and Political Structure

The economics profession is inherently a political one. There is no such thing as a value-free economics, even if many economists would like to pretend to such a value-free social science in the same way that mathematics can be conceived of as a value-free science. But even the practice and respect for mathematics requires a functioning culture which isn’t present in most human societies in most places across most times.

Economics also has a certain political aspect to it that the economics profession tends to want to downplay in favor of the enlightenment narrative of ever-progressing social knowledge that moves from an ignorance-riddled past into a more informed and efficient present.

In real-life practice, economics has never been value-free. The practice has always been implemented under certain philosophical assumptions, which is why the profession is so fractured among incompatible sets of ideology with different fundamental assumptions.

Different governments and economic actors will employ different kinds of economists depending on their political ends. And they will ask those economists to facilitate their ends by either providing technocratic advice or justifying theories. Whether or not those theories correspond to reality as it is will tend to be secondary to whether or not their behavior supports the desired goals of a given government.

So, for the United States, the critical concern that the government might have to bring to economists would be figuring out how to fund the social programs put into place by the FDR and LBJ administrations without upsetting the rest of the apple cart of state. Higher questions about whether or not those programs ought to be in place will usually be off the table of discussion, because the programs are so popular. A great many things which are impossible are highly popular. A great way to end your career in what’s called ‘policy’ is to tell people that something popular that they want isn’t possible.

Under popularity-contest-government, the way to advance an economic doctrine is to come up with convincing sophistic argument for shimmying around public resources to make a fantasy seem like it’s real. Part of this involves creating a popular craze for an impossible doctrine while also telling the people that all they need is to believe in something hard enough and shout loud enough for it to be commanded into being. Presto-chango! Free drugs for everyone! Whenever the magic fails to materialize, the public can always blame heretics, nonbelievers, and saboteurs.

Attempts to argue that the masses should stop demanding impossible achievements from the profession of economics are doomed to fail, as are attempts to make every person into a philosopher-king. It’s hard enough to make one king into a philosopher.

by 9 Comments

Who Sets Your Agenda?

By “Agenda,” I mean your personal agenda — the tasks that you set for yourself to accomplish by the end of the day. Do you set that agenda, or does someone else?

Because of the way that our minds work, we can only hold so many ideas and trains of thought in our mind at the same time. When you start your day by bathing in whatever story some other unfathomable confluence of interest groups has decided to bathe you in, you cede control of your life — as you actually live it — to someone else.

You’re, by no means, immune to this in any social context or in any system of government. Civilized men are not especially isolated creatures. It’s important for us to understand what’s going on in our communities and areas of interest. This tendency of ours — the social instinct — has been ably hijacked by ‘user interface designers,’ software developers, and hacks like yours truly to keep people on a never-ending loop of checking what other people are thinking and doing in the moment. Joining that group are television producers, movie people, magazine editors, and all the rest of them eager to buy a slice of your thoughts.

Simply disconnecting from the larger herd — and perhaps focusing on the smaller herd of your family, or even of the people whom you need to work with throughout your day — is a better way to take control of your thoughts, and by taking control of your thoughts, you’ll have better control over your actions. When you have more control over your actions, you also have more control over your environment.

Exercising this control is something that I sometimes struggle with, personally, because of a bottomless curiosity and desire to understand the world as it is. But to be free in a meaningful sense is to be comfortable being ignorant about the majority of what exists. Most people in the world speak in languages unintelligible to us, in a social context completely alien to our understanding. It’s easy to fool ourselves that we understand — or that we can understand — because we can use simple theories, encyclopedia articles, and newspaper reports that go through several cycles of translation to think that we know what’s going on beyond our area of awareness.

Proactively deciding what to be ignorant about is probably more important than deciding what you ought to know. It’s by ignoring most things that you generate the free mental space and time to grasp what you actually need to know.

Top Posts & Pages