In a recent political “discourse” online, I was confronted with an aspect of our world and the human psyche that stunned me.
What interests me in discussions with people “on the other side” of certain political, social and ethical debates is not finding the right facts to “convince” them of my perspective, nor is it to rage against their -to me, inhumane- viewpoints with charged emotions.
What I am interested in is finding the place in their thinking that is one step -one logical inversion- away from my worldview.
To do this, I start with first principles: What is your foundational understanding of the world and your relation to it?
This bypasses all the arguments and debates that could go on ad infinitum if we kept our discussion to specifics: specifics about what one particular politician on your “side” said, or about what country did to another at a specific isolated time. This isn’t to say that these specifics are not essential and important topics of discourse, but rather, if you have a certain worldview and I have another, the exact same fact, or anecdote or event could mean something completely different within my worldview than it does within yours… hence the feeling of “talking past each other” that so often happens in these kind of heated debates.
So I was adamant to excavate, in this online discussion, to the core of this person’s primary framework to understand the root of the divergence in thinking that led to our opposite political ideologies.
And long story short, we hit the root.
He explicitly stated that he believes that it is each person’s prerogative to care about their “own” people and not others.
Suddenly, all his other political views clicked into place. In fact, they made sense.
And it made sense why, when discussing with someone like me – who conversely starts from the premise that all living beings are worthy of our care, regardless of our relation to them- we would find no meeting point in any of the political topics we discussed.
I think what surprised me was not that he held this view at his core, but that he was so conscious of holding it.
Because from my perspective, within my worldview of universal care, this was it right here in the open… the conceptual glitch at the root of all “evil” in the world.
But by taking a step outside my system of meaning… I saw how that same belief, that our only responsibility is to care about our “own” and not “others”, is a pretty natural belief for a human animal to hold.
It almost gives me vertigo to switch between these two perspectives, because one’s whole world shifts depending on which belief is your starting point of understanding.
So here I felt we arrived at the irreducible impasse; I believe all humans are worthy of my care and he believed only his “own” were.
Where could i go from here in convincing someone to widen the scope of their ethical consideration when they just don’t value that as an intrinsically important thing to do?