“Your essays should be persuasive.” That’s what I have been told from some parts of academia.
“Persuasion is the key to success.” That’s what I have heard from several places outside academia.
Right. The world is a battlefield, where we are constantly battling against other humans, other competitors, competing to pitch our ideas, competing to sell our products, competing to sell ourselves. Survival of the fittest it is. (Sarcasm intended.)
Yet there’s a part of us that wants to believe “Helping others is good. Altruism is good.”
And when one thinks about it, the two actions of persuading others and helping others can often times be at conflict with each other. To help others means to inform them, to provide them with sufficient information so that they can make the right choice, regardless of if their choice is against what I’m supposed to persuade.
Indeed, one may still be said to be persuading, but it’s not persuading in the usual sense. It’s persuading others to do something that is in their good interests, rather than your good interests.
Nerds may continue, others may skip.
There are several qualifications here. What you think of as good will vary. The above notion of “your good interest” assumes the usual short-term (few months or years) interest of getting your paper published, getting yourself hired, selling your product, pitching your idea. If one think in longer runs, one can begin to ask questions including
- Are publishing papers necessary for a good research career? Is a good research career about publishing papers and “appearing” good to the “others”? Or is it about doing what seems interesting and promising, and explaining your results, even though sometimes they can result in “unpublishable” papers?
- Is getting yourself hired necessary for a good life in the longer run? What is a good life? Is it living in a way you consume the resources of a 100 sustainable lives? Or is it living in a more sustainable way that is more appropriate with “live and let live”, which may not actually require much resources, thus making a good hire not an absolute necessity? Or is it living minimally yet getting yourself hired good so that you can do more good?
- Is selling your product necessary for expanding your business? What is the business for? Is it for the good of the buyers?
Often times, what people think of as their good interests can actually not be good at all. A parent may think sending their child to labour instead of school is “good”. Yet if the same parent is persuaded that a good education can better their child’s life, and probably even their own and their village’s, what they think is in their good interests will actually be different.
Some interests are “more good” than others. And measuring goodness requires more relevant knowledge. And how do you obtain more relevant knowledge? Certainly not by claiming that what you know is necessarily correct. A more fruitful method would be to instead find issues in whatever you know, find evidence that contradicts your knowledge, then update your knowledge. But this essentially is scientific method.
Thus, assuming best interests on the part of whosoever suggested, “You should learn to persuade others,” rather than interpreting it as
- “Pick up a side, find evidence in support of it, find counterevidence against it, argue against why the counterevidence is not a counterevidence, and then throw this side and the arguments at whosover you want to persuade,”
a more fruitful interpretation might be
- “See all the sides, or at least as many as you can, find evidence and counterevidence against each of the sides.” Then depending on if you want to find “the reality”, you could try to use your reasoning as well as the reasoning of the dozens if not hundreds of people who thought about it before you, and come up with a single unifying side that explains all the evidence and counterevidence for each side. Or if you are not interested in finding “the reality” for whatever reason, and are comfortable treating reality as not-really-known but treating the different sides as views through different windows of the same reality, you will just need to explain all the different sides to whosoever you want to persuade.
If you want to use knowledge to make a choice, then it becomes necessary that there is a “single reality” aka that we know “the reality” as best as we can, because if not each view will give us evaluations of our choices that cannot directly be compared with each other. Comparing them to make the best choice requires a metaphysical commitment to a single reality. It is still possible to make a good choice even if not the best by not committing to discover the single reality, but comparing the goodness of choices becomes difficult if not impossible: one choice could be much better than another, which could indeed be only slightly better than another, when evaluated from the perspective of the single reality; yet we cannot ever know this by merely knowing the different sides without knowing the single reality.
PS: Yes, when it comes to survival, persuasion in the usual sense – by hook or by crook – can be okay, but relying on it through an unjustified activation of our fight or flight systems while living a life better than 90-99% of the populace seems to ring alarm bells.
PPS: There are other places where it is us who are doing the job of thinking; in those places, you tell or command others rather than persuade. A good politician may choose to trust in the the thinking of a good socioeconomics expert/s without being convinced himself/herself.
The mind of just another human born in 1999. 