Against Persuasion
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Against Persuasion
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Re: Against Persuasion
#2I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
Re: Against Persuasion
#3I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
>why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
Maybe he was on the autism spectrum?
Re: Against Persuasion
#4I know it's a cheap way of thinking about it, but I just can't get over writing a whole article (on further reading: a whole book) trying to convince your audience that they shouldn't be trying to persuade people. (Of course, that's not the whole of the point—it's that discovery should be a collaborative process, not a one-sided process of the 'right' imposing their worldview on the 'wrong'—but writing a Boston Review article, or, rather, a book from which a Boston Review article is excerpted, is a pretty one-sided process.)
Re: Against Persuasion
#5I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
Perhaps Socrates was not in fact wise….But perhaps he would have told you that.
Re: Against Persuasion
#6I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
Speaking truth to power has always had its risks, yes. But, wisdom isn't the same as self preservation. Down that road is acquiescence, and cowardice. Perhaps he made a choice: to be remembered as unprincipled in the face of personal risk, or to die in sacrifice to his principles and be a guiding light for those who seek the truth for millenia to come.
Re: Against Persuasion
#7The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded? How do people develop a higher degree of openness? Then I thought...maybe if you're not being bombarded with opinions that are aggressively trying to convince you of something, you'll explore the world in a more open way, looking constantly for the next informational morsel that will evolve your mental schema of the world.
Re: Against Persuasion
#8I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
Socrates is attested not just by Plato, who was a huge fan boy, but also by Aristophanes who didn't care for him and Xenophon who was fairly neutral.
Re: Against Persuasion
#9I think the largest problem of persuasion right now is that no one (left or right) is willing to really try to understand what it is like in the shoes of the other. Until we get past that, we're just going to keep fighting. The only ones that see this are those that recently switched sides (aka usually moderates).
Re: Against Persuasion
#10I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
Based on my readings of the contradictions in the various accounts, I would say he intended to die. He, in effect, I think, found a way of enacting the story of Empedocles, where Empedocles tries to die by jumping into a volcano so he will have just seemingly vanished and be believed to have ascended to godhood but was revealed by his bronze sandals. And in some ways seems reminiscent of Yukio Mishima.
And it seems to have worked, to a degree. Over 2,000 years later, everyone from layman to politician invokes his name and death as often as they do Jesus. Not existing is often a really good way of kind of existing seemingly forever.