On Changing One’s Mind

It’s easy to get caught up in an idea. This can be personal—“my life will be perfect once I marry the right man!” or social—“if only we can seize and redistribute capital among the workers then everything will at last be fair!” or maybe both at once: “once utopia has been achieved, I can finally settle down with the right guy.”

We might work, individually or collectively, to bring about our goal, imagining we’ll do it perfectly: we will never argue with our imaginary husband, and that expropriating the expropriators won’t lead to massive and continued bloodshed this time.

In the absence of a shared set of norms—religious or civic—people are free to pursue these fantasies, and the liberal state will even permit the existence of groups that call, say, for the revolutionary overthrow of the same state that permits them to rally in the street. Art and culture can play with ambivalent and dark feelings, the blood-filled cul-de-sacs of human history. It’s hard to keep open the play of symbols and signs, but it’s possible to cling onto core values and reality while trying on different ideas for size.

The moment of pluralist playfulness, of free expression in all directions, has for now, passed. Most likely, it never really existed, being merely another nice idea. Even (especially?) in the absence of a religious culture, blasphemy laws never really disappear. But as many people are now keenly aware, into the empty space of play has entered a set of false and destructive ideas, subtended not by reason but by terror. In the West we too quickly distance ourselves from the excesses (and indeed, the formation) of the past—human sacrifice, witch hunts, violent mobs of all kinds—by imagining that we are beyond all that. We have the iPhone now—we’re not about to build a pile of skulls out of our enemies, surely. Losing someone awful their job is hardly a big deal, is it?

But we forget at our peril that our civilization is based on the slow and painful process of transcending these acts of violence and scapegoating, and that we are always much closer than we think to sliding back into barbarism and bloodletting. The somatic lullabies of streaming television and readily available food trick some into imagining that we live in heaven’s waiting room. This is no joyful place, however, but rather a place of stultification and anxiety, just waiting for the next catastrophe. Outside, wars, machines, and bureaucrats continue to destroy humanity, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. 

It is both ironic and unsurprising then that from this uneasy and guilty safety many have slid into something like a “compassion cult” that takes as its central feature a feeling of injustice and instructs us to “be kind” at all costs. There is much to feel angry about always, but it’s hard work to understand the workings of global capital and its need for war; much easier to hate your neighbor for a thought you don’t like, particularly if you don’t know them very well.  

Yet there has been a palpable thaw in what can and can’t be said. Perhaps it was the failed assassination attempt against Donald Trump which exposed the dangerous game of comparing someone to Hitler for years on end and then pretending to be surprised when someone tries to rid the world of evil. Trump’s brush with death posed the following question in stark terms: if Trump is Hitler, as progressives and Democrats have been saying for nearly a decade, and killing Hitler is just and necessary, then why did Biden and others not welcome the attempt to murder him? President Biden’s stated instead: “I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well… There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.” So the Hitler comparison was—of course—a sham.

Perhaps the thaw is a consequence of Musk’s takeover of X, which saw an opening up of taboo subjects following years of censorship by progressive moderators. Perhaps enough people are tired of feeling afraid, or are bored enough to want to talk about real things again. In more serious terms we can talk about a having lived through a decade of “pathocracy”—a term coined by the Polish psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski, who died in 2008—to describe a political situation where “a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people.” We can call them bullies, narcissists, authoritarians. They have different names in different eras, but their behavior is the same: they seek to impose their desires and narrative on everyone else, either by physical violence, or by social and economic punishment.

There has been much discussion in the wake of the shooting of Trump about whether the right—whatever we mean by that—should emulate the left in cancelling its enemies. After all, look at the damage the progressives have carried out against normal people who wanted to voice their concerns, speak their minds, and protect their families. Some commentators have invoked game theory and scorched earth policies. A few voices have called rather for magnanimity, which does not preclude, naturally, punishment for those who ordained truly destructive bad ideas. 

Most likely there will not be a final culture war showdown. Most likely there will be an uneven combination of continued cancellations and ever-increasing fragmentation of positions. Echo-chambers will become echo-platforms.

Still, paradoxically, there may also be more interchange between those who would have previously been hostile to one another. Taboo ideas will become objects of discussion. Cancel culture as a tactic will be recognized for what it is: an act of bulling and mobbing, on a continuum with playground behavior. Bullies too need help. 

Changing one’s mind is one of the great advantages and privileges of having one in the first place. We change our minds all the time: we do not think many of the same things we did when we were little, even though we are the same person. If we are entering a new phase in the culture war, or an end to this part of it—and let us hope that we are—there must be a way for people to come back from positions they no longer agree with, or that they never agreed with but went along with out of fear, ignorance, or apathy. These are not the pathocrats, those leading the charge, but the conformists, who would be followers in any regime. Some people never made up their mind in the first place; some were true believers. What of the latter?

After World War II, Richard Crossman, a British Labour Party Member of Parliament, collected several essays under the heading The God That Failed. Here former Communists and fellow travelers, among whom Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright and André Gide, described what it was like to be convinced that their worldview was the correct one and then what it was like to be disillusioned. Koestler describes the takeover of his mind by the Marxist worldview:

Gradually I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place.

Undoubtedly something similar has happened to many who now find themselves questioning the progressive mindset. Today there is a simpler mechanism than classical dialectics: good person/bad person (or sometimes, oppressor/oppressed). This black and white worldview makes it easy to dehumanize others. Surely that person deserves to lose her job and friends for saying something contrary to progressive values! If she didn’t, why would we be doing it to her? That would make us monsters. And that can’t be right. We’re the good guys!

What happens, then, if the Great Awokening becomes the Great Disillusionment? Those of us already cast out from acceptable opinion and progressive society have to demonstrate through our lives and rituals that we have something positive to offer, that there is a better way to live with each other, beyond shame and terror. This is not a cult of self-victimhood, which would be a repetition of progressive nostrums, but rather the slow accretion of a different kind of strength. Not the uncertain strength of status, of being “liked,” but rather the work of being a better person, of putting duty, loyalty, and others first: real others, those close to us. Of refusing to be cowed by tyrannical and cynical raids on our humanity. Of remembering the humanity of others and of refusing to dehumanize even those who seek to destroy us. None of this precludes real anger or the judicial restoration of balance.

Fortunately, we have tradition and faith to draw upon. This is the collective wisdom of ages, available to all. Rather than attempting to start society from scratch again—a periodic human desire which always ends in catastrophe—we should begin with all that we already have. This includes our bodies and souls, our families, the places where we live, and the values passed down by our grandparents and previous generations. We are them; they are us. What they had to tell us we can recover: our lives are not our own, in the most profound way.