I cannot recommend the book How Minds Change by David McRaney highly enough. In essence, the book discusses the scientific reasons how, and why, our minds can change. I normally don’t care for scientific books, but this one completely hooked me. If you read this book while keeping in mind the ongoing societal food fight about what is actual truth, I think it will hook you as well.
Something I came across while reading the book today particularly jumped out at me. McRaney posits that humans are wired to work in collaboration, as opposed to individually. During human evolution, it was safer to live, work and travel in groups. Those woolly mammoths could be murder! Individualism is actually not normal. Putting this in a contemporary perspective, this brought the recent developments at Twitter to my mind. The person who forcibly took over seems to think he can run the whole operation by himself because of his purported genius. Sort of reminiscent of someone else who has been all over the news for the past 7 years. Remember I alone can fix it? Anyway, the person now in charge at Twitter is far from a genius, and even if he was, he alone could never run it solo.
I’m actually beginning to think the Fediverse model of online social interaction just might be the way to go forward. Initially I was skeptical, to say the least; I looked at a structure with no hierarchy and an infinite number of individual servers and two words came to mind: chaos and anarchy. But I’m beginning to think I just wasn’t thinking out of the box. I’m beginning to see there are ways to deal with bad actors across the whole system, and so long as the collaboration model holds up it should stay safe enough. I do have to admit, it is a better model than they have over at the bird site right now.
Obviously I’m still in the process of reading the book. I’m hoping that it will cover ways i can talk to people with differing views from me without it becoming toxic, having them shut down, and possibly destroy friendships, as has happened with a few of mine. Honestly, all I have ever wanted to do was try and understand why people think, act, and vote the way they do. But it doesn’t seem possible to get there without the rhetorical boxing gloves getting donned, on all sides. I’m never out to forcibly change anyone’s mind on anything; I don’t think it’s in me to do that. I just want to proverbially sit down over coffee or other beverage of choice and just have a conversation. Sometimes it feels like that might not be possible anymore. I’m hoping this book might show me some ways how to make it possible.
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