Human communication is very confusing. We often feel that we get it, that we know how communication works, we’ve done it a lot, right? Our whole lives we’ve talked to other people. We know the flow, we get the gist. We can even make adjustments, adapt to people, we’re just that good.
Except, we aren’t. We don’t really know communication. We know a narrow band of communication, the types we have done over and over again.
But communication has a tremendous range. It goes from very obvious and simple, to incredibly complicated and confusing. Communication warps and alters across situations. It has many different purposes. And, really, it warps and alters with every person we speak to. Yes, that’s a human being across from you, and yes, you’ve talked to many of them. But what’s inside this particular human being’s mind?
Well, every mind is like a casino. Lots of stuff going on in there. And some of these games you’ve never even seen before.
Which brings us to talking to people who have absorbed massive amounts of propaganda (MAGA is a prime example, but there are many, many other absorptions out there).
When you communicate to someone who has absorbed mounds and mounds of propaganda, you can throw most of what you know about communication out the window. Because this is a very, very different psychology to talk into. It’s not a normative human psyche; it’s one largely taken over by absorbed script, heightened emotions, and behavioral agendas to which you do not subscribe. You are talking into very intense, mind-consuming rhetoric that is different than anything you’ve experienced yourself.
Which means that your normative communication training -- ie, looking for rational truth, calmly discussing issues, being nice, having fun, taking turns, not being cruel, not jumping straight to hardened conclusions -- will now be working against you. The person you’re talking to has a propagandized mind, it has absorbed odd stuff. It’s been fed screed, repulsion for the other (aka, liberals), script handed down by think tanks, all flushed into minds hour after hour after hour via loud, colorful, repetitive, hyper-visualized social and cable media.
You’re not talking into a calmed mind. You’re talking into a mind that has absorbed a circus without cages for the tigers.
How do you do talk to that kind of mind?
You prepare to do it, that’s how. You learn political and rationality zen (not easy, trust me, but you have to be able to stay emotionally outside the exchange). You learn to listen and gather info, without challenging that info no matter how crazy it sounds (because they cannot take challenge, they’ll bolt from the conversation). You learn to go into meta-talk, and find out how they came to believe what they believe, how they like to think/not-think, if they want to learn.
In other words, if you want to go in and rescue minds, if you want to be able to talk persuasively to propaganda-infested people -- you have to get good at it.
Because it isn’t “normal.”