Friday, March 1, 2013

On changing the liberal mind

To be fair, changing one's mind on almost anything of importance is both a rare and difficult event.  And it's even more so in trying to change another person's mind.  Research has shown that we tend to make up our mind initially relatively quickly and based on a minimal amount of evidence, whereas changing it requires massively more counter-evidence and a longer time period.  So with that short intro, I offer you this essay on liberals becoming conservatives (or at least non-liberals).  Here's an astute observation from the article:
The whole thing rarely happens overnight, although it can. It resembles tearing down a structure and building a new one brick by brick. The final collapse of the first building tends to be the quickest part, with the changer now perceiving that structure as having been a house of cards, essentially fragile, although previously the person had been unaware of that fact.
Read the whole article here.