Delusion, Desire & Political Discourse: Debate the Dreamer, Not the Dream.

this video is a little bit unusual in
that i'm really talking about something you can do in your own life talking to your professors talking to your co-workers talking to your classmates probably above all else in talking to your own parents you may have noticed that in many of my discussions of philosophy and politics i shift the question being asked in a subtle way from talking about the validity of an idea to questioning what sort of person believes in that idea what sort of person profounds that idea what sort of person is attracted to that idea and why i very rarely state explicitly that the person speaking to me or the person who's youtube video and criticizing i very rarely state explicitly that's what i'm doing but i think it's a really important method and it's a way of getting the people you're talking to to reason through the things they believe in as if they don't believe in them and maybe to start thinking rationally about aspects of their life that may be entirely irrational politics is largely about human passions human desires the extent to which that's true is in a word terrifying with politics we're always dealing with things that people want and things that people hate and things that people fear and you know the academic discipline of political science does a very good job of creating this veneer of rationality of taking unreasonable things and presenting them in reasonable terms but when you're actually at the dinner table with your own parents and they're stating things to you that are not just factually wrong but you know that they only believe in these things that you know to be wrong for bad reasons because let's just say you know your parents well enough you know your parents want to have a feeling for the the motivations that lurk behind why it is they're saying the things they're saying why it is they believe the things they believe you're not just looking at the facts and i said way isn't it interesting that in that most intimate setting all the textbook discipline of philosophy and political science is suddenly useless and indeed taking the ideas or the ideals your parents believe in and trying to put them in a balance measure them weigh them see what they're worth it's only going to get your parents into a more and more hostile and defensive position now sometimes in politics we deal with ideas that mean different things to different people that are very poorly defined even by those who propound them those who are most enthusiastic about them and we deal with a lot of ideas that have a different meaning in different cultural contexts suppose you met someone who was a militant egalitarian feminist born and raised in south korea south korea is a culture that's in some ways familiar right and in some ways quite exotic i can already imagine reasons to be a militant egalitarian feminist in south korea be very hard for someone to relate to who grew up in london england los angeles california or what have you if you're going to talk to this person and you know you're you're maybe interested in understanding their their view of the world the way to evaluate what feminism means to them and what it is they're trying to accomplish and so on is not to take this idea of feminism that's already abstract and then try to weigh it in the balance it's not to say to them well you know i'm not really sure if if feminism is good or bad i'm not really sure feminism is a is a good or a bad idea right a really productive way to approach the issue is to talk about their motivations in particular so to approach the question of why would someone choose to become a radical feminist why did you in south korea choose this what attracted you to this why did why is this your cause why do you think of this as part of who you really are okay it's so simple i think people find it very hard to do i think people find it very hard to set aside how they feel about islam very hard to set aside how they feel about zionism and talk to this particular person and ask them how did you become committed to islam how do you become committed desires what do you think about the motivations of people who are are drawn to this and once somebody is in that more reflective frame of mind you know you might be surprised at the answers you get i've had people who are muslim i would not say devout muslim but i've met people who are muslim and who said to me honestly that they find it so embarrassing when they meet white people who were born and raised christian and who chose to convert to islam at their temple they find it so embarrassing and these these converts they're often much more radical and more fundamentalist and more serious about islam than they are themselves and i've spoken to muslims who told me honestly that if their parents and grandparents hadn't pushed them into this they wouldn't be a part of this religion but now that they are a part of the religion they can see both good and bad in order they have some kind of some kind of balanced you know evaluation of their position in relation to this ideology when you're talking about it in terms of their in terms of their motivations and you know if you if you talk to a young woman who's a radical feminist from south korea she may likewise have have reasons that put a very human face on it and that you know set out some very attainable goals right that you can understand what it is she's trying to accomplish what what are the changes she hopes to see you know in her lifetime now i'm very self-critical in the same way i can look at any particular book on my bookshelf or any particular ideology i've been involved with in the past in my misspent youth and i can also evaluate what is it about this that that attracted me right and in doing so i'm not making a judgment on the philosophy i'm not making a judgment on the ideal i'm making a judgment about who i was who who at that time i wanted to become and you know now also i can reflect on who it is i really am i uh i went to a high school with a significant percentage of black students i don't think they were the majority but i don't know 30 percent 40 we had a lot of black students my last high school and i remember talking to black students who were trepidatiously at that time taking the steps to identify themselves as as black radicals as black revolutionaries i remember one telling me in a very halting voice she knew she knew that i knew a lot about communism i've been raised in a communist household i remember her sort of coming out of the closet and talking about the extent to which she considered herself a marxist revolutionary and so on and again it'd be very easy to respond to that kind of thing by shutting someone down and saying kind of don't you know how terrible marxism is or don't you know what terrible communism is don't you know and a much more productive way to engage with them for yourself also so you're going to learn something about them you may learn more about the ideology and what it means to be what it means to its adherence or whatever how you're going to learn about how they see the ideology even if they see it in a totally distorted way you're going to learn about what islam means to muslims and what communism means to communists you're going to learn some of that but you can also start to engage them in thinking rationally about this thing in their life they're so passionate about that if they ever thought about it rationally probably they haven't for for quite a long time now one of the viewers of the channel sent me a link a couple days ago to a video that was supposedly giving you advice on how to speak to people who were delusional video opens it's a it's a hit video there's over 300 thousand views i've called uh opens with this long definition that this means delusional in a clinical sense not just somebody you disagree with or somebody you criticizing for believing something different from what you believe yourself clinical definition of delusional set out for you again and again that part of the video is okay and then he shifts into his advice for what you should actually do when talking to someone delusional i thought it was the worst advice in the world he talks about the importance of not being encouraging to the person their delusions not just saying to them oh yeah you you believe this crazy irrational thing and kind of humoring them he talks about that being stretched and he also tells you not to directly confront them not to tell them that their delusion is wrong because he claims then they will just regard you as crazy because they believe in their delusion and if you overtrip it um i really grew up with a father who was delusional and i can say that he really enjoyed being delusional now you know in the category of people who are deeply delusional but still able to brush their teeth comb their hair and hold down a job i think that's a pattern you'll see again and again it's not so much that their delusions are so compulsive that they have no control over it whatsoever because if that were true they maybe wouldn't be brushing their teeth and holding down a nine-to-five job but they enjoy wallowing in their delusions i feel like they enjoy indulging their delusions and they enjoy exhibiting their delusions to others and [Music] you know on the other hand of course i also have experience confronting and dealing with delusional people on the street on the bus um these people may or may not be homeless they may not be drug addicts but people who are delusional and ranting to or talking to any any stranger in those kinds of public situations and you know i've several times been with other people who didn't know what to do when a a crazy apparently homeless person you don't really know but seemingly homeless person starts ranting and i handle it really well in this situation i really diffuse situation address i seem to get this person back in touch with reality by talking to them and then you know we go our separate ways but they stop disturbing everyone else on the bus or to the situation several times when there are other people around friends or colleagues of mine and they say wow like have you studied this stuff how do you not do that and every single time i say no i just grew up with these parents i grew up handling my own parents and i take those same skills i have and i apply them to crazy homeless people from the street that's the that's the honest truth remember a crazy guy on the bus started ranting in a delusional way textbook typical delusions of grandeur uh he was talking about how he's a multi-millionaire and he has access to these bank accounts and all these was obviously someone who's poverty-stricken and probably homeless um and i didn't do any of the things this video said i didn't do any of these kind of psychological techniques you know i looked at him straight in the face it was very clear i wasn't scared everyone else in the bus was terrified of this guy everyone's looking around people are looking down at their book or looking down their cell phone everyone's kind of looking out their window and um you know i said to him you're talking but nobody's listening to you nobody here wants to hear what you're talking about do you notice that do you notice this guy was reading a book this guy was do you notice that you know who do you think you're talking to who do you think's having a conversation with you now what do you think these people think of you and your ideas i was just drawing in again and again the sense that there's an audience here there's a society and that his evaluation of himself is not the only evaluation that matters right um and the next step is maybe already be there on the first step is to is to ask him why he's doing this what is motivating him to do this why are you telling a bunch of strangers on the bus this secret of how you made millions of dollars by taking it out of the out of a bank account why you know what kind of person does that why are you doing what's what's making you tell me this right now okay i'm not going to go through too many other examples but obviously part of the effect of that on the delusional person is that i'm very self-confident and they can hear look i know what's real and what's not i'm here in reality talking to you you seem to be in a dream and i'm saying to you this is the real world not a dream and you know there's a kind of contact between two worlds one that's more more real than the other um you know about the only thing that would get my father to break out of what i would call you know delusional ranting and again it's partly because he enjoys it he enjoys oh he's deceased now he enjoyed being the center of attention he enjoyed telling a story and feeling that other people are affirming that his story is important again if it's totally delusional totally insane or what have you um so almost any kind of response can just affirm his ego affirm that he's an important person telling an important story and so but it would stop the delusions it would stop the ranting if in the same way you were just going to call in the witnessing of other people of society as a whole where you you'd say to him in effect no one else here wants to hear this story nobody thinks you know what you're talking about everyone can tell that you're just making this up everyone knows this isn't true you know and then again the the next step being to question his motives you know okay why would you want to tell me what you just said about joseph stalin why why would a father say that to his son or you know and these were not all situations at home it could literally be that we were out at a cocktail party you know there are other people in the room it's like why would you want to say that why would someone say that to this group of people this kind of shocking horrifying insane thing you just said what would motivate you to do that now obviously i'm saying to you the audience now that this was a kind of very childish attention-seeking behavior of wanting to be the center of attention and of being willing to say terrible things in order to be the center of attention a lot of what we describe as insanity when it pertains to people who manage to brush their teeth comb their hair and keep a job a lot of what we call insanity within that range really is childishness persisting into uh persisting into adulthood the only thing that would ever be effective in bringing my father out of this kind of delusional state and putting him in touch to reality and getting him to kind of adjust the difference just stop ranting just stop was in this way kind of summoning forth the witnesses of society and say look this is how people see you this is how other people hearing this hear you okay and then you move on to ask what kind of person are you what kind of person would do this what kind of person would believe this or make this statement whether it's about joseph stalin or anything else what kind of person would be propounding this delusion um not all believers are delusional not all beliefs are delusional the examples i gave earlier talking to a south korean radical feminist talking to someone who's a member of the muslim faith but who has mixed feelings about it is willing to talk about ironical detached way i am not saying those people are comparable to a crazy ranting homeless person who's lecture everyone on the bus or to my own father who lectured absolutely everyone around him his whole life especially especially his employees because they couldn't they couldn't just leave or tell him what hassle um uh however i think it is much more than just a coincidence that these two things that they have this resemblance and again i make this video to suggest to you that this is a method you can practice this is a method you can practice in your own life and you can stop yourself this person is lecturing me or harambee this person is sharing their delusion with me or this person is you know testifying to their belief to me whatever this thing is they believe in and maybe joseph stalin maybe anything else you know what instead of responding by questioning the belief instead of responding by questioning whether the earth is round or the world is flat this is someone with the delusion that the world is flat they understand something like this you know we can start to ask the question of what kind of person would be attracted to that belief and why what motivates you to tell me now that the earth is flat what kind of person would believe that one person be attracted to that and even in this setting right now why why wouldn't you keep it a secret you know why would you why would you tell me um there are questions of motivation there and i think that in the whole theater of politics even when we're dealing with people that are not delusional we're always dealing with passion being much more powerful than reason we're dealing with the domain of desires and we do ourselves a disservice to pretend that we're debating the facts