tstorm823 said:
If you had different circumstances in your own life, you'd have a different perspective, but we all only have one life to live, so you should at least listen to those with a different perspective without assuming they're trying to deceive you.
Hey there, someone who tries to listen to different perspectives here.
It's something I do quite often. Either asking "Am I the bad guy here?" or "Why does this person think the way they do?". It keeps my moral compass on the straight and narrow, and it helps me figure out what people might actually need. It's also valuable in writing, as everyone is the hero of their own story, and things are often very nuanced. Using that can often lead to wildly better stories than "black and white morality" based ones.
Heck, even if I disagreed with Leg End earlier in the thread, I understood his perspective and chose not to argue further with him about it, because I understand where he's coming from, even if my experiences lead me to a completely different conclusion.
...But here's the thing. What makes the "You should listen to our perspective!" cries from the right gaslighting is one simple fact.
For them, it's a one way street.
I almost never ever see a right winger try to understand the more leftist perspective. I almost never see them try to compromise in our direction. The massively overwhelming amount of the time, it's always them asking us to compromise to their positions.
I've tried debating people on this site and in person a heck of a lot, and it's exceedingly rare to get a "Huh, I'll think more about that" from people with a more right wing perspective. I've tried several times to ask "What about X's perspective" to someone who thinks women rule everything and got bupkiss every time, for example.
For a more public example, look at the Affordable Care Act.
Obama had the votes to get a single payer system (assuming he played hardball with the Blue Dog Dems). Did he shove it through? No. He tried to compromise with the GOP. Here's how that went.
Obama: Hey, how about we compromise to a Government Option?
GOP: NEVER!
Obama: ...Ok then...How about we implement the Individual Mandate system proposed by the right wing heritage foundation, and pushed for already by Mitt Romney?
GOP: NO! NEVER!
Obama: ...But it's your own idea.
GOP: NO! NEVERRR!
Obama: Fine, I'll just push your own idea through, and hopefully the fever will break.
GOP: *Tries to repeal Obamacare like 50 some-odd times*
So yeah. It's unfair to have this one way street of sympathy and compromise. It's gotta be at least SOMEWHAT mutual.
The people you think are horrible don't think themselves horrible. Even if they are horrible, they don't think that of themselves. Ted Nugent doesn't think that statement makes him a monster. Donald Trump doesn't think his statements make him a monster. If you refuse to acknowledge a perspective that makes them not monstrous, you're refusing to understand the truth. For your disagreement with someone to have any value, you need to be disagreeing with their actual perspective. You can't just say "sounds to me like that's evil, so they're evil." The vast majority of the time something sounds evil to you, it's because you don't understand them. Very few things are said with the purpose of being evil.
This
is something I always try to keep in mind, actually.
When I see the elected GOP fighting against making poor people not die of preventable medical issues, I say they're evil, not because they sound evil, but because their positions are corrupt and based in greed and they cause people to die and these people KNOW IT and don't care.
When I see Fox pushing the narrative that "Ermagerd, we're all going to be replaced, the democrats literally have a plan to replace all white people with unamerican mexicans!!!" I say they're bad people because the position itself is factually wrong, and bigoted.
When I see evangelicals screaming about how LGBT people are destroying the moral fabric of the nation, I say they're bad people because LGBT people provably cause no harm and are just trying to live their lives happy and peacefully, and opposing that is either out of pure bigotry, or just being misinformed and brainwashed by religious nuts.
I can usually understand they they hold their positions (Corruption in the first case, and "fear of becoming a minority which they often mistreat and they are afraid of that happening to them" in the second), but that doesn't change the fact that I think positions like this are bad positions.
It's also why I don't hate the people in depressed factory towns who were swayed by trump's rhetoric on trade. Their position's not odious, just misinformed. I'm not going to hate someone who was lied to and believed it.
It's why as much as I despise organized religion, I don't aggressively shove that in the face of believers. Even if I think the entire structure is dangerous and harmful, I'm not going to tell a person that the thing that gives them spiritual meaning is bad and force that on them (at least, as long as they're not actually using it to hurt anyone).
But I also have to take people at their word. If a right winger is making an obvious metaphor for violence against the left (or in Gavin Mcinnes case, actively promoting violence), then I'm going to take them at their word that they're bad people who want to hurt people they disagree with.
Final point: even if people lie to you, that doesn't make it gaslighting. Gaslighting is making someone question their sanity. People disagreeing with you are trying to make you question your perspective. These are not the same thing. If anything is going to make you question your sanity, it's going to be trying to live in a world where you think half the people are evil and nearly everyone goes along with it as though it's just polite disagreements.
And this is where my two points coincide with this.
1) Conservatives often lie to us, using it as any other tool to try to make their position look correct, and claim anything that invalidates it is "biased" or "fake news".
2) The right wing consistently demands we compromise to them, and understand their perspective, and they refuse to to the same for us.
3) A lot of their positions are just plain wrong and harmful.
Given that...Yeah, it's kind of gaslighting. If someone has a harmful position, lies to you that it's actually not harmful, then is angry that you aren't sympathizing with and trying to understand their position, AND then they never try to understand your perspective...If that's not gaslighting, that's dangerously close, and still harmful.
Like...Conservatives are the ones who:
- Wanted to keep homosexuality illegal and beat/shock the gayness out of people.
- Were in favor of continuing segregation.
- Think it's acceptable that Insulin that costs 30 bucks in Canada costs 300 dollars in the US despite it costing 6 bucks to make in both countries.
- Think it's wrong to give people a wage they can live on, no matter what full time job they have.
And many other positions like this.
Now in the first two cases, we mostly won. But did the left win by appealing to their sympathy and asking them to understand our perspective from the goodness of their hearts?
No. We didn't.
The left won those battles by aggressively arguing and dragging the conservatives kicking and screaming to the correct position.
In the first case, until people on the right started feeling like it was ok to come out as gay to their conservative families, who then turned to the right side of the issue because now it's personally relevant to them.
In the second case, it was until basically everyone agreed that deliberately keeping blacks and white separate and trying to keep them in lower class districts and schools was kind of a dick move.
And you know what? There are conservatives STILL railing against those positions.
So how will we win fight number 3?
By just going "oh please, conservatives! Please please sympathize with the poor family that can't afford to buy lifesaving medication!" and hoping they come around?
Or by aggressively pushing for it until it happens and then watch as conservatives who ARE affected by it go "Holy shit this new position helps me so much!" and the position becomes accepted by the right, who will likely claim credit for it in the long run (like some conservatives try to do with Martin Luther King).
My money's on option B.
Not to mention, how do you debate and sympathize with people who argue that you are literally the spawn of satan, as the LGBT haters do? How can you expect people to keep repeatedly justifying their (harmless, might I add) very existence when faced with people who refuse to consider their perspective, and who being harmed as a result?
So yeah, I will continue to try to understand the perspective of people I disagree with. But I'm going to keep disagreeing with the heck out of people who hold positions that, even after I try to empathize, turn out to be harmful.
I may disagree with you, and fight your positions and tell you you're wrong and that your positions are harmful, but unless you yourself are actively and willfully trying to hurt people, I'm not going to say you're a bad person. Just misinformed.
And this is WITHOUT attacking the low-hanging fruit, just so I can try to make a more compelling argument.
From my perspective, Bernie Sanders sounds like insane rambling completely disjointed from reality.
There is no way to say this without it sounding gas-light-y, but...
You know most of his positions are centrist fare almost everywhere else in the civilized world, right?
So...It's REALLY hard to believe that the entire rest of the civilized world is insane and completely disjointed from reality.
