Arguments are only half the battle

[Brad Sherard]

To encourage people to make the leap to peace, some require an environment hospitable to peaceful people and hostile to statists. Consider the lone man on some college campus screaming about how taxation is a form of theft. Everyone rolls their eyes and goes about their day. Consider a different environment where several people are all gathered together and all talking about the involuntary nature of taxation and one person joins them. People do not deal with arguments alone. They don't have the time and will not risk the effort to engage in such ideas if the speaker does not display any assurances of stability. People respond to ideas posed by some desperate individual begging them to listen differently than a whole society that dismisses anyone who disregards some belief.

 

People don't evaluate the argument alone. They calculate what it means for them if they accept it. Many religious kids have heard all the arguments refuting deities but do not find them convincing until later when they are away from their parents. An argument is often not even the real issue being evaluated at all.

 

So given all that, providing a community that does more than simply beg for people to listen to reason would go a long way towards inviting more people to the cause of peace and voluntarism. With regards to say comment sections and various social media sites, It can be very subtle things, like a comment section regarding some topic filled with people not all frantically insisting that some topic is right, but people unworriedly knowing thats the case and treating it as obvious, moving on to subsequent ideas. It can be people dismissing trolls and desperate liars rather than pretending they need any honest rebuttal of their sophistry. It can be people having fun and making jokes, being friendly with one another all under the umbrella of the posited idea in question. People coming in to such a conversation do not see a lone wolf begging for an audience. They see a community unconcerned with them.

 

Simple things like that go a long way. A person who sees a guy wasting his time trying to beg trolls to be reasonable is not going to be very impressed. Anyone who ignores reality by trying to argue with liars is going to be estimated to be not very clear minded. Such a person is not likely to have anything worth listening to. So I think mockery, dismissal, jokes, all the social cues that indicate the nature of a group beyond the arguments themselves, but the actual actions of their champions, these are essential to inviting people to new ideas.

 

 

I was inspired to make this post when I saw this comic. Somehow the mockery seemed more appropriate than the rigorous approach to dealing with some of this statist nonsense: http://redpanels.com/90/