Name one time in your life when you insulted someone for hours and they said, “You know what, you’re right.” Maybe if the person has thick skin and doesn’t mind getting some tough love, you can name a few experiences. But I wager that for the most part, such an outcome was rare.
I’m 42. I’ve argued hundreds of times with people that held opposing beliefs, and I can count on one hand when someone told me, on the spot, that I was right about something. And those were times I was being very kind and patient.
Nobody decides to believe something; they’re convinced, or they aren’t, and what convinced them usually isn’t one fact. It’s layers: experiences, disappointments, things they got wrong, hopes about the future, and very often a person they trust who told them.
When you go after someone’s belief, you’re not removing a brick; you’re dealing with a wall of bricks, and that takes time. Insult them, and now they’re not just defending the belief; they’re defending themselves against you, and you have to get through another wall about them before you reach the wall that matters.
People do this on instinct because they want to fight like their favorite e-celebrities in blood sport debates. They think “owning” someone is how it’s done, failing to realize these people are merely entertainers, not serious thinkers or figures who want to truly effect change.
Imagine you’re a doctor, and someone walks into your practice with a disease, and you’re the one with the cure. And you treat them like this:
“You’re an idiot. Who were you around? How did you let this happen?”
They’re leaving. And they’re not coming back, and they’re definitely not taking your medicine, even though your medicine works.
Now do it the other way:
“Here’s what’s going on. Here’s the cure. Take it whenever you’re ready.”
You can’t force anyone to swallow anything. They might not even believe they’re sick. Your job is to lay it out and leave it with them.
That’s the whole difference. You’re not attacking the person for being sick; you’re attacking the sickness so the person can stop being sick.
This is how you should see people who are infected with mind viruses, infected and insulated by a cult. You should not treat them like e-celebrites treat each other; they get paid to put on a show.
The same thing applies to people who are on the fence about a topic, coming to you and asking for an explanation.
Picture a Mercedes salesman.
A man walks in looking for a car. “What kind of car, idiot?”
He hesitates at the price. “What, are you broke?”
Nobody sells anything that way. And everything in life is sales—even asking someone to pass you the salt that’s in arm’s reach. You’re always making a case to someone who has the option to say no.
The people selling conspiracy theories understand this perfectly. They’re excellent salesmen, except that what they’re running is a con. They package a lie so well it looks like the truth, and they deliver it with warmth to people who feel talked down to everywhere else.
Then the people trying to correct them show up with contempt and then wonder why they fail to wake people up from their delusions.
You must learn to deal with people with patience and respect. Our greatest minds don’t engage in such egotistic behavior.
No serious philosophers or scholars engage in blood sports debates. The most intelligent people on earth engage in arguments via peer-reviewed papers and debunk claims with scientific research and experiments. If they do engage in a debate, it’s at a university with a moderator, using serious arguments against the belief system, not personal attacks against their interlocutor. In other words, they don’t sit on the Internet for hours, hurling insults around and clip farming for “content” to make money, which is what all this debate bro space is really about.
That’s the part most people miss.
When you challenge someone like Candace Owens over claims you can show are false, her audience comes for you, and it looks like loyalty to her. It isn’t. They’ve invested in her, both financially and emotionally. They’ve adopted her beliefs and argued for those beliefs and told their families about them. Attacking her is taken as an attack on her followers because it implies their judgment of her was bad, and that lands as a personal attack whether you meant it that way or not.
Why do they trust her in the first place? This is where it gets very strange. Someone catches the government lying once and concludes the government can never be trusted about anything again. But when a commentator they follow is caught in a falsehood, that’s taken as evidence that powerful people are trying to silence her.
Same evidence, opposite conclusions. The difference is which one they are heavily invested in.
You can go after the seller, and it does something. Slay the shepherd, and the flock scatters. But the flock will usually defend the shepherd first, because the shepherd is the one who told them they’re smart enough not to be fooled.
What actually works with the people following them is to only attack their beliefs.
State the facts. Show them where to check it themselves. Don’t mock, and don’t try to make anyone look stupid; deliver the same thing the same way as many times as it takes. Most people put up a wall the moment they feel disrespected, and once that wall is up, you’re not reaching anything behind it.
That said, patience isn’t endurance. Plenty of people aren’t arguing in good faith, and you’ll know them by what they do with an answer: they don’t engage it; they move to the next thing. In that case, drop the facts, leave the link, and move on. You’re not there to win the exchange, and you’re not obligated to absorb disrespect to prove you’re the patient one. The people worth reaching are often watching the thread rather than posting in it, and they see how you conducted yourself either way.
What happens over time is quieter than winning. Eventually somebody notices that you never insulted or mocked them and that they’ve been disrespectful toward someone who was patient with them. That feels like something, and it opens a door that no amount of humiliation ever will.
This is why I don’t respond to people who attack me anymore. It won’t change anything, it wastes my time, and it reinforces the very behavior I want that person to drop. If I insult them back, I become one more thing they have to defend themselves against, and the beliefs I’m actually trying to reach get one more layer of protection.
People abandon a belief when its support breaks; your job is not to be one of the reasons it stays up.
it's of course easier said than done but an important message
Can I insult the people trying to sell the conspiracy theory? Cuz those people are nucking futs.