I think some people believe that you can just throw a bunch of facts at somebody and that will change their mind. It’s true for some people, but for a lot of people it’s just not true.
First off, in order for a fact to be useful, a person would have to treat it as more important than how they feel about a thing, and dare I say, perhaps most people won’t do that on every subject. I would wager that for almost everybody, there are at least a few subjects where their personal feelings are weighted more heavily for them than their external observations. Sometimes this is okay, especially where it’s harmless. Other times it can be dangerously irrational and lead to very bad outcomes for the individual, those around them, and their civilization.
Some people have subjects on which it isn’t even their own feelings that dominate their decisions, but rather a stimulus-response pattern based in past bad situations. This is at its peak in psychotics, if you’ve ever been around one—they aren’t cute, funny people, but rather very unpleasant, irrational people who hardly even respond to things that are happening in present time and are instead enacting some drama from god knows when/where. But one doesn’t have to be psychotic to have this phenomena occur. Normal people have this sort of thing happen all the time, on some subjects—it’s to a much smaller degree then it is with a psychotic, but it still happens.
This is why, every time I’ve tried to work out the solution to some societal ill, the only thing I can come back to is that we have to help people improve their understanding, ability to observe, and help them be free of the demons that haunt their days. Otherwise there’s very little likelihood that we will be able to solve the vast problems of society. It’s composed of individuals, and unless you help those individuals as individuals, you’ll never truly solve the fundamental difficulties of this civilization.
Max Kanat-Alexander 