He said that any new ordinance wouldn't help this man, but it would act as a prevention for others who have the same problem in the future, and if an ordinance were in place the man wouldn't have this problem. I said that the only way this man can be helped is by doing what he is doing, telling others to boycott the store, voluntarily. He agreed, but believes it still won't work regardless. In his eyes this man shouldn't have to do anything to get what he wants (no flashing light.) I don't agree with that, but if I were to express this belief he would construe it as me not caring about the man's problem.
What To Do When You Are Attacked Personally in a Debate?
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He said that any new ordinance wouldn't help this man, but it would act as a prevention for others who have the same problem in the future, and if an ordinance were in place the man wouldn't have this problem. I said that the only way this man can be helped is by doing what he is doing, telling others to boycott the store, voluntarily. He agreed, but believes it still won't work regardless. In his eyes this man shouldn't have to do anything to get what he wants (no flashing light.) I don't agree with that, but if I were to express this belief he would construe it as me not caring about the man's problem.
helmuth_hubener
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Back with more thoughts. Expanding on my previous advice to try to really understand him, here is an excerpt from a book that explains the idea perfectly:
In summary: You need to develop a supreme acceptance of who this man is, rather than making any attempt to change him (an attempt which will fail).
You also have to decide what you want from the relationship. What are your goals? We as posters in this thread might make any number of assumptions about what you want to have happen, how you want this to all turn out. Most such assumptions will probably be wrong.
Once you understand him, and once you understand yourself, once you understand both of your positions and natures, then you can take your knowledge of those givens and use them to go about making your situation better, whatever that may mean for you.
I hope this helps.
From the life story of Ben Franklin:
...Determined to break this pattern and change his ways, Franklin decided there was only one solution: in all of his future interactions with people, he would force himself to take an initial step backward and not get emotional. From this more detached position, he would focus completely on the people he was dealing with, cutting off his own insecurities and desires from the equation. Exercising his mind this way every time, it would turn into a habit. In imagining how this would work, he had a strange sensation. It reminded him of the process he went through in creating the Dogood letters—thinking inside the character he had created, entering her world, and making her come alive in his mind. In essence, he would be applying this literary skill to everyday life. Gaining position inside people’s minds, he could see how to melt their resistance or thwart their malevolent plans.
To make this process foolproof, he decided he would also have to adopt a new philosophy: complete and radical acceptance of human nature. People possess ingrained qualities and characters. Some are frivolous like Keith, or vindictive like his brother, or rigid like the printers. There are people like this everywhere; it has been that way since the dawn of civilization. To get upset or try to alter them is futile—it will only make them bitter and resentful. Better to accept such people as one accepts the thorns on a rose. Better to observe and accumulate knowledge on human nature, as one accumulates knowledge in the sciences. If he could follow this new path in life, he would rid himself of his terrible naïveté and bring some rationality to his social relations....
To be truly charming and socially effective you have to understand people, and to understand them you have to get outside yourself and immerse your mind in their world.
Only when he realized how deeply naïve he had been could Franklin take the necessary steps to move past this naïveté. His focus on gaining social intelligence was the turning point of his career—it transformed him into the preeminent observer of human nature, a man with a magical ability to see into people. It also made him the perfect social companion—men and women everywhere fell under his spell because of his ability to attune himself to their energies. With tranquil and productive social relations, he could focus more of his time and attention to writing, to questions of science, to his endless inventions—to mastery.
It might be deduced from Benjamin Franklin’s story that social intelligence requires a detached, emotionless approach to people, making life rather dull in the process, but this is hardly the case. Franklin himself was by nature a very emotional man. He did not repress this nature, but rather turned his emotions in the opposite direction. Instead of obsessing over himself and what other people were not giving him, he thought deeply of how they were experiencing the world, what they were feeling and missing. Emotions seen inside other people create empathy and bring a deep understanding of what makes them tick. For Franklin, this outward focus gave him a pleasant feeling of lightness and ease; his life was hardly dull, but simply free of unnecessary battles.
Understand: you will continue to have problems in attaining social intelligence until you come to the realization that your view of people is dominated by the Naïve Perspective. Following Franklin’s example, you can reach this awareness by reviewing your past, paying particular attention to any battles, mistakes, tensions, or disappointments on the social front. If you look at these events through the lens of the Naïve Perspective, you will focus only on what other people have done to you—the mistreatments you endured from them, the slights or injuries you felt. Instead, you must turn this around and begin with yourself—how you saw in others qualities they did not possess, or how you ignored signs of a dark side to their nature. In doing this, you will be able to clearly see the discrepancy between your illusions about who they are and the reality, and the role you played in creating this discrepancy. If you look closely enough, you can often perceive in your relationships with bosses or superiors reenactments of the childhood family dynamic—the idealizing or demonizing that has become habitual.
By making yourself aware of the distorting process of the Naïve Perspective, you will naturally grow less comfortable with it. You will realize that you are operating in the dark, blind to people’s motivations and intentions, vulnerable to the same mistakes and patterns that occurred in the past. You will feel your lack of real connection to other people. The desire will naturally arise from within to change this dynamic—to start looking outward instead of focusing only on your own feelings, to observe before you react.
This new clarity about your perspective should be accompanied by an adjustment of your attitude. You must avoid the temptation to become cynical in your approach as an overreaction to your prior naïveté. The most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways. Some people have dark qualities that are especially pronounced. You cannot change such people at their core, but must merely avoid becoming their victim. You are an observer of the human comedy, and by being as tolerant as possible, you gain a much greater ability to understand people and to influence their behavior when necessary.
With this new awareness and attitude in place, you can begin to advance in your apprenticeship in social intelligence. It will yield invaluable skills that are essential in the quest for mastery.
Understand: we can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons (see here), which gives us the ability to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empathic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience. To do so we must overcome our great fear of the Other and the unfamiliarity of their ways. We must enter their belief and value systems, their guiding myths, their way of seeing the world. Slowly, the distorted lens through which we first viewed them starts to clear up. Going deeper into their Otherness, feeling what they feel, we can discover what makes them different and learn about human nature. This applies to cultures, individuals, and even writers of books. As Nietzsche once wrote, “As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion.”
...Determined to break this pattern and change his ways, Franklin decided there was only one solution: in all of his future interactions with people, he would force himself to take an initial step backward and not get emotional. From this more detached position, he would focus completely on the people he was dealing with, cutting off his own insecurities and desires from the equation. Exercising his mind this way every time, it would turn into a habit. In imagining how this would work, he had a strange sensation. It reminded him of the process he went through in creating the Dogood letters—thinking inside the character he had created, entering her world, and making her come alive in his mind. In essence, he would be applying this literary skill to everyday life. Gaining position inside people’s minds, he could see how to melt their resistance or thwart their malevolent plans.
To make this process foolproof, he decided he would also have to adopt a new philosophy: complete and radical acceptance of human nature. People possess ingrained qualities and characters. Some are frivolous like Keith, or vindictive like his brother, or rigid like the printers. There are people like this everywhere; it has been that way since the dawn of civilization. To get upset or try to alter them is futile—it will only make them bitter and resentful. Better to accept such people as one accepts the thorns on a rose. Better to observe and accumulate knowledge on human nature, as one accumulates knowledge in the sciences. If he could follow this new path in life, he would rid himself of his terrible naïveté and bring some rationality to his social relations....
To be truly charming and socially effective you have to understand people, and to understand them you have to get outside yourself and immerse your mind in their world.
Only when he realized how deeply naïve he had been could Franklin take the necessary steps to move past this naïveté. His focus on gaining social intelligence was the turning point of his career—it transformed him into the preeminent observer of human nature, a man with a magical ability to see into people. It also made him the perfect social companion—men and women everywhere fell under his spell because of his ability to attune himself to their energies. With tranquil and productive social relations, he could focus more of his time and attention to writing, to questions of science, to his endless inventions—to mastery.
It might be deduced from Benjamin Franklin’s story that social intelligence requires a detached, emotionless approach to people, making life rather dull in the process, but this is hardly the case. Franklin himself was by nature a very emotional man. He did not repress this nature, but rather turned his emotions in the opposite direction. Instead of obsessing over himself and what other people were not giving him, he thought deeply of how they were experiencing the world, what they were feeling and missing. Emotions seen inside other people create empathy and bring a deep understanding of what makes them tick. For Franklin, this outward focus gave him a pleasant feeling of lightness and ease; his life was hardly dull, but simply free of unnecessary battles.
Understand: you will continue to have problems in attaining social intelligence until you come to the realization that your view of people is dominated by the Naïve Perspective. Following Franklin’s example, you can reach this awareness by reviewing your past, paying particular attention to any battles, mistakes, tensions, or disappointments on the social front. If you look at these events through the lens of the Naïve Perspective, you will focus only on what other people have done to you—the mistreatments you endured from them, the slights or injuries you felt. Instead, you must turn this around and begin with yourself—how you saw in others qualities they did not possess, or how you ignored signs of a dark side to their nature. In doing this, you will be able to clearly see the discrepancy between your illusions about who they are and the reality, and the role you played in creating this discrepancy. If you look closely enough, you can often perceive in your relationships with bosses or superiors reenactments of the childhood family dynamic—the idealizing or demonizing that has become habitual.
By making yourself aware of the distorting process of the Naïve Perspective, you will naturally grow less comfortable with it. You will realize that you are operating in the dark, blind to people’s motivations and intentions, vulnerable to the same mistakes and patterns that occurred in the past. You will feel your lack of real connection to other people. The desire will naturally arise from within to change this dynamic—to start looking outward instead of focusing only on your own feelings, to observe before you react.
This new clarity about your perspective should be accompanied by an adjustment of your attitude. You must avoid the temptation to become cynical in your approach as an overreaction to your prior naïveté. The most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways. Some people have dark qualities that are especially pronounced. You cannot change such people at their core, but must merely avoid becoming their victim. You are an observer of the human comedy, and by being as tolerant as possible, you gain a much greater ability to understand people and to influence their behavior when necessary.
With this new awareness and attitude in place, you can begin to advance in your apprenticeship in social intelligence. It will yield invaluable skills that are essential in the quest for mastery.
Understand: we can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons (see here), which gives us the ability to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empathic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience. To do so we must overcome our great fear of the Other and the unfamiliarity of their ways. We must enter their belief and value systems, their guiding myths, their way of seeing the world. Slowly, the distorted lens through which we first viewed them starts to clear up. Going deeper into their Otherness, feeling what they feel, we can discover what makes them different and learn about human nature. This applies to cultures, individuals, and even writers of books. As Nietzsche once wrote, “As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion.”
In summary: You need to develop a supreme acceptance of who this man is, rather than making any attempt to change him (an attempt which will fail).
You also have to decide what you want from the relationship. What are your goals? We as posters in this thread might make any number of assumptions about what you want to have happen, how you want this to all turn out. Most such assumptions will probably be wrong.
Once you understand him, and once you understand yourself, once you understand both of your positions and natures, then you can take your knowledge of those givens and use them to go about making your situation better, whatever that may mean for you.
I hope this helps.
ClydeCoulter
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I don't see that as a personal attack ("you just don't care" is a personal attack), but an attack on the "root problems of a thought", where personality could be removed, but has been injected. The statement could be reworded as a question of ideological consistency. Just as the attack he made (in the OP) about "spontaneous order" actually ending in "chaos" is an unsubstantiated claim (neither giving proof) needs consistency and basis.
(This is a good discussion, thanks for the OP)
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jmdrake
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But your friend is discounting the possibility that A) the ordinance might not pass because most people might think it was stupid and B) there could be other things that might prevent someone from sleeping and you can't pass a law for everything, although people try. Also, why should everyone get everything that they want, especially if they could fix the problem themselves with hedgebushes and blinds? Or, here's another cheap and easy solution that's actually guaranteed to work.
Alone it wasn't, but he coupled it as a justification for a previous assessment that I'm anti-social (which he's not using to mean sociopath as it should mean, but to mean a combination of atomist, selfish, and asocial.) My usage wasn't a personal attack, but it used his negative personal assessment of me to show that one can construe him to have the same characteristic as he had attributed to me, using the same methodology. It was multi-purposed: to show that he is being inconsistent, but also to show that it is easy to construe somebody as not caring and that he might be wrong in his prior assessment that I don't care about other people because of my views.
jmdrake
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Good point! How often do those of us who advocate for smaller government get the "You just don't care about (the poor, the environment, the innocent people being killed by a despot)" argument? What we know to be true, but have a hard time articulating, is that often the regulations, welfare and wars just make the problems being "solved" worse and/or exacerbate or create new problems. What we have to do to win hearts and minds is move beyond simply railing against government "solutions" to better expressing ideas about non government solutions.
helmuth_hubener
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Good! You have already started to try to understand him. Continue pursuing more and deeper thoughts like this, and you will go far and have success.
I brought that up as well, and he said that it would likely pass because people would be afraid of it happening to them. I knew that if I questioned this, he'd use an "appeal to authority" fallacy and say that he knows how these things work because of his experience. So I didn't bother.
He'll agree in general that not everybody should get what they want, but his bias for this specific circumstance puts the guy being bothered in the right and the business-owner in the wrong. He also believes that these large signs don't do much at all for the business and that the business owner would not be hurt with these restrictions. I told him that he has no way of knowing that, and cannot substantiate it. That was another dead-end.
If you're interested here's the news story.
http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013...ds-boycott-of-store-over-its-bright-led-sign/
This bit is interesting
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jllundqu
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Agreed. I have many friends from different parts of the political spectrum. Heck, half my family is uber-liberal california crazy! There are plenty more important things to talk about with friends and family than politics (and religion). I had to find this forum to discuss my ideas. I have no one to talk to about politics, otherwise.
aGameOfThrones
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invisible
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This!
Go ahead and let him drag you into the argument. Agree to do so, only if you will not be subjected to personal attacks, point them out if they occur, then tell him you will continue the next time you see him. The biggest problem you will have in flipping an argument around on him, is that he is probably too young to own or have owned property himself. To win the argument with him, you will need to demonstrate two things:
1) How zoning / central planning would keep HIM from doing things he wanted to do, or violate HIS property rights.
2) How zoning / central planning would harm others, or discourage productivity in the economy (destroys the "you don't care about people" attack).
A few quick examples off the top of my head:
He enjoys fishing, and wants to buy a boat. His garage is too small to keep a boat in it, and the zoning ordinance says that he can't keep it anywhere else on his property or park it on the street.
He wants to put a tv antenna on his roof. Should his neighbor who dislikes him be able to keep him from watching tv because he's "blocking their view of the skyline / mountains / sunset"?
Neighborhoods change, and thus the demand for different goods and services changes over time. If the zoning ordinance was written in 1930, the location of commercial zoning designations will by outdated. This creates an unnecessary burden on both those who want to supply the needs of the residents, and on the residents themselves because they cannot buy the goods and services they need.
If zoning exists to "isolate and concentrate undesirable activity", then why should that "undesirable activity" be forced onto some arbitrary group of people? Demand that he explain why some people should be "helped" at the expense of "hurting" others.
Surely you can think of many more examples that will hit close to home with his own personal interests. Always keep him on the defensive. Always flip things around, and use his own arguments against him.
Christian Liberty
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I know too many idiots to do this
Seriously though, there are certain family members I think I've decided I'm not going to talk about politics with anymore. Its just not worth it. I don't care how stupid ones views are so much as how they discuss them. If a person will rationally debate (In this case I use "rational" to refer to style, not substance) or at least be reasonable I'll talk to them. Very different when I get personal attacks, or worse, attacks on my age.
Ender
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Dude- give him an answer.
Something like:
a) The neighbor needs blackout curtains on his bedroom windows.
b) The neighbor needs some negotiating skills: "I'll sweep your drive if you'll turn the lights out at night" or some such thing.
While your friend goes off on these, find other answers/solutions; turn it into a game and have some fun.
If he gets personal just say "Come on- is that the best you've got?"
Something like:
a) The neighbor needs blackout curtains on his bedroom windows.
b) The neighbor needs some negotiating skills: "I'll sweep your drive if you'll turn the lights out at night" or some such thing.
While your friend goes off on these, find other answers/solutions; turn it into a game and have some fun.
If he gets personal just say "Come on- is that the best you've got?"
acptulsa
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Turn it on him. There's always a way. Then de-escalate.
Oh, I care about children all right. It's you who care more about the politicians and the subcontractors getting their cut. If you didn't, you'd let people keep enough of what they earn to be able to contribute to private charities, which are demonstrably more efficient than any government, or county governments, which are demonstrably more efficient than the federal government. So, obviously, you care much, much more about the fat cats getting their cut than about any children. If you care about any children at all. Are they giving you a cut too?
Oh? You don't want to get personal? Then don't get personal and debate me like a rational person, and I won't fight fire with fire. Agreed?
This sort of retort can always be found, once you get practiced at looking for it. What's more, it almost always gets under their defenses. And even when it doesn't, it leads every witness in the room to declare you the winner of the debate.
Seriously. The only way you can't use this is when you're just flat dead wrong. And even then something along these lines can usually be found anyway.
Oh, I care about children all right. It's you who care more about the politicians and the subcontractors getting their cut. If you didn't, you'd let people keep enough of what they earn to be able to contribute to private charities, which are demonstrably more efficient than any government, or county governments, which are demonstrably more efficient than the federal government. So, obviously, you care much, much more about the fat cats getting their cut than about any children. If you care about any children at all. Are they giving you a cut too?
Oh? You don't want to get personal? Then don't get personal and debate me like a rational person, and I won't fight fire with fire. Agreed?
This sort of retort can always be found, once you get practiced at looking for it. What's more, it almost always gets under their defenses. And even when it doesn't, it leads every witness in the room to declare you the winner of the debate.
Seriously. The only way you can't use this is when you're just flat dead wrong. And even then something along these lines can usually be found anyway.
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enhanced_deficit
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No one can really "attack" effectively/offend you without your consent. It is upto you if you decide to dignify personal attacks with a response or not, better to ignore unless major consequences or political costs etc.
Natural Citizen
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This is the answer, I think.
I would only add that often people who tend to view themselves as leaders or perceive themselves to be viewed as leaders by those around them feel threatened in situations like this and so this is a human tendency to retaliate in this way because it is, in effect, something that they themselves take personal. It's a way for them to reassure themselves (if even in their own mind) that they are...oh, I don't know...something.
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mosquitobite
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Well said,
Someone only has the power to control you if you allow them that power.
That's how bullies operate.
Funny thing is, it was a full-fledged internet troll that taught me that!
