Great idea! Instead of approaching it as “your beliefs are wrong, here is why” (Which will never work), you can simply start asking them questions about their beliefs! If you simply act genuinely curious, you won’t raise the ego defenses.

And they’ll either realize that their beliefs are wrong, or they will stick to their beliefs. But in that case you will understand their beliefs better and so feel less angry. Win/win!

Meg, let’s say you found someone who believes kicking puppies is the right thing to do (but doesn’t take any action on that), and you think they don’t have the right to believe that. What are you going to do about it?

You can’t control other people’s beliefs. You might try forcing them to take therapy or something, but you can’t help someone who doesn’t want help. In fact, by trying to convince someone their beliefs are wrong, you only make them hold those beliefs stronger. (I saw a study somewhere, can’t remember where, with Democrats and Republicans. At first, about 30% of the Republicans were hard-set in their beliefs, the rest were luke-warm. Then they presented good logical arguments to them as to why some Republican policies are bad. At the end of the study, about 70% of the Republicans were hard-set in their beliefs. In other words, hearing arguments against their beliefs only made those beliefs stronger.

Shadowart, you make a great point. Sometimes we enter a moral grey territory there, where we can’t really avoid forcing beliefs onto one another. A great example would be someone wanting to cut down a tree, and someone resisting.

I don’t have a be-all and end-all answer there . But I sure know that understanding others will often stop me from feeling bad about things I don’t control.

@Danman:

Good quote. Thanks for sharing it!

Let’s take the above statement as our axiom. Then let’s take Meg’s Puppy-kicker problem as an example. Based on our axiom the puppy kicker has the right to his beliefs, and we have the right to disagree with him.

Alas he does not have the right to exercise his beliefs cause that’d be forcing them on the poor puppy. Should he exercise them it’d be wrong. HOWEVER, it’d be equally wrong for us to intervene and stop him. Cause that’d be forcing our beliefs upon him.

So how to respond should our puppy-kicker decide to exercise his beliefs? There is no perfect answer and find an as good one as possible is a matter of many compromises, possibly one of the worlds hardest and most important questions. As far as my reading comprehension goes, Vlad isn’t trying to answer it in this blog post, though he is addressing that the problem exists. This blog post is about not becoming puppy-kickers rather than how to deal with them.

So why wouldn’t you want to be a puppy-kicker? To draw your stick to the stack that is a more peaceful world? Maybe but there’ll still be unsolvable contradictions. Let’s take the man who believes you’d be better of dead. Alas you’re forcing your believes upon him by continuing to live! Can’t deal with him, can we?

No, this is a method for making friends, or at least neutrals, of your enemies. So if that is a goal you’d like to archive, then add this method to your toolbox. Remember, just cause you have it there in the toolbox doesn’t mean that you always have make use of it!

It’s not a method guaranteed to work but I’d say it’s a quite efficient one at least. And the real world is all about being efficient!

This definitely works for the small things like religion, politics and toilet paper

The statement “I’m quite happy with people believing whatever they want” perhaps irked me more than it should have. Personally I am not happy with that. I am not happy with the businessman that owns all the properties in my town’s main street believing that he can do what he likes with them and destroy our community and local economy. I am not happy with people believing that women are second class citizens. There is no way I am happy with people believing its ok to drive drunk on our roads (or even footpaths if it comes to that!!). . .

While I might seek to understand why they believe these things are ok, I am not prepared to tolerate their beliefs and even if I do come to understand where the beliefs come from I will probably still be pretty upset about them. In fact, my strength of feeling in the opposite direction means that I will probably even take some sort of action to force my own beliefs on these people . . .

I do think tho that there are certain principles that simply cannot be justified, and people should be burned ot the stake, or dragged behind a galloping horse for believing that these beliefs are valid. Alternatively, sit them down and have them attempt to rationalise their belief. I find that often that alone will get them to see the error in their thought process. You don’t even need to actively poke holes in their theories, they’re usually lame enough to fall apart by themselves.

As always, Vlad, great article. Thanks

Surely if we sit back and accept that any value system holds some kind of validity simply based on the fact that people have a ‘right’ to believe “whatever they want” we are condoning the belief and to some extent the behaviour that flows from it?