Why You Won’t Be Able To Change Their Mind

I am sure you have faced a situation where someone you knew had a totally delusional belief about something. You tried to show them facts, but they refused to pay attention. This is only normal.

Attitudes, beliefs, and opinions do not exist. You are wasting your time going against them. Only feelings exist. People have feelings. Their attitudes, beliefs, and opinions are mere justifications. Consider people who are pro-life. Do these people believe/think that fetuses have a right to live? No, they merely feel that fetuses have a right to live. They come up with a pro-life opinion to justify how they feel. Pro-choice people simply do not feel that way. The two groups are not ideologically opposed. They are emotionally opposed. They are in different emotional spaces. If you want to convert a pro-choice individual into a pro-life one, arguments are mostly a waste of time. Show them pictures of dying fetuses and things will take a wild turn. Aristotle calls it appeal to pathos. In psychology, we call it the peripheral roots of persuasion. Once they feel different, they would automatically change their stance.

There is a reason why some people become conservative after they become parents. They undergo hormonal changes, which change how they feel. Once they get used to the new feeling, they come up with a new set of justifications. Liberals do not grow up to become conservatives. They feel up to become conservatives. Their feelings change with their income and marital status.

Similarly, people who advocate for higher minimum wages probably work a minimum wage job or see themselves working one. They feel financially insecure. If you want to change their attitude, make them feel on a consistent basis that getting a high-paying job is very easy. Once they become used to this new feeling, they would never think about minimum wages again.

The root of all beliefs, attitudes, and opinions is feelings/emotions. If you want to change someone’s opinion or attitude, you must make him feel different. And this new feeling must be consistent. Feeling responsible occasionally does not make a man responsible. When he is put in a position of responsibility for a time span long enough that he forgets his old self and identifies with the new feeling, he becomes responsible.

Similarly, if you want people to be creative, make them feel that it is perfectly fine if they think or say unconventional or crazy things. They should feel creative before they become creative. If you want people to be sincere, allow them to feel sincere. Do you want people to be free? They must feel free before they act freely. This is also how the role we put in changes us. We start to feel a different set of emotions. Once we feel them for long enough, we become them. I remember when I was a substitute teacher, I gave more responsibilities to students that were considered bad or irresponsible, for I knew precisely why they were irresponsible. They were treated like they were irresponsible. Thus, they acted irresponsibly. Don’t even bother debating with most people. Know how they feel. If you want to help them, allow them to feel something else.

How do we make people feel different? Humans are feeling creatures. Everything we see, hear, smell, eat, and sense makes us feel a certain way. What we see, hear, and sense spiritually primarily cause our feelings. Sight and sound can be manipulated, but the spirit world can't. Everything we do in the spirit world affects people around us. Let's say you want to take someone with self-limiting beliefs and place him among confident people. Even if the latter never said anything motivating to the subject, he would still become like them in the long run. In his book, "Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships," Daniel Goleman calls it contagion or emotional contagion. I was fascinated by the book. I read it all the way back in my first semester in college. The point where I differ from him is the pathway. He thinks that the pathway is neural. I think the pathway is much deeper. He thinks that feelings go from one individual to others. I think the entire Universe is full of feelings. There are no non-living beings here. We are biased to think of ourselves as conscious living beings and the Universe as dead matter. In my world, we are deeply interpenetrated, more deeply interconnected than we can ever imagine. When we think a thought or produce a feeling, we create a disturbance in the spirit world. The disturbance then propagates outwards. And there is nothing we do to disconnect because we are fundamentally one with this whole show.