How to Change Righteous Minds

Here are some unorthodox ideas about how to save the world by changing people’s minds (their “righteous beliefs”) to be more open and inclusive. I call this collection of ideas the “Philosophy of Communion”.

Righteous beliefs and social group identities

A righteous belief is a moral belief that defines an “ingroup” vs. an “outgroup” by judging whether someone is good or bad. Moral good/bad judgements can be classified into six flavors of opposition:

1. Care vs Harm
2. Fairness vs Cheating
3. Loyalty vs Betrayal
4. Authority vs Subversion
5. Sanctity vs Degradation
6. Liberty vs Oppression

For example, an extreme righteous belief that expresses all six flavors might be stated as follows: “Muslim immigrants are lawless [authority-subversion] heathens [sanctity-degradation] who exploit our welfare system [fairness-cheating] while giving safe harbor to terrorists [loyalty-betrayal] who murder our people [care-harm] and enslave the minds of our children [liberty-oppression].”

The boundary between good and bad describes the boundary and identity of social groups: the ingroup are those who conform to “good” behavior —the “Us”; the outgroup are those who exhibit “bad” behavior — the “Them”. Take a moment to consider your own attitude towards social groups —the classes, creeds, ethnicities, or cliques you hate in your most unguarded moments. We have empathy for the ingroup; but we dehumanize, deindividuate, and disable our empathy response for the outgroup. As Freud observed with his concept of “the narcissism of small differences”, the closer and more similar competitive social groups are, the more division they harbor against each other. Neuroscientists have proven that we automatically turn off our empathy response to social groups classified as Them. Oxytocin, the love hormone, generates aversive rather than attractive behavior toward groups categorized as Them.

How are righteous beliefs changed?

The elephant in the room of moral discourse is that moral beliefs cannot be changed by reason (principle, evidence, deduction, or inference). Even humanists, liberals, and intellectuals, who claim to use reason to argue moral change are in actuality only defending or enacting a group moral practice that arose in other ways, rather than causing it in others or themselves. This is the reason for the failure of most discourse that attempts to cross moral divides, and explains the otherwise strange historical fact that cogent arguments against bad practices (e.g. against slavery, racism, child labor, footbinding, duelling, etc.) are usually widely known decades or hundreds of years before social change actually happens. While this has been studied extensively in modern moral psychology, a vast amount of our time is taken up in useless attempts to argue each other out of our moral positions, while those who know how to manipulate us dangle caricatures of ‘Them’ in Facebook posts designed to herd us into action.

Righteous beliefs can only be changed by “recruiting” members from one group to the other. Recruiting (used here metaphorically) is accomplished in two ways, which we might call plan “A” (preferred, for reasons explained below) and plan “B” (to be tried if Plan A fails):

1. Plan A: Heroism of outgroup towards the ingroup
2. Plan B: Shaming of in-group by outgroup

For ease of understanding what follows, let us call the social group with the divisive righteous beliefs the ingroup (for example, white nationalists) and the group that is shunned and wants to be treated as equals, the outgroup (for example, muslims).

1. Heroism of outgroup towards ingroup

In plan A, representatives of the outgroup “save” one or more representatives of the ingroup from a common adversity, at a cost or risk to themselves. Essentially, this is an heroic act of love.

Common adversaries are typically disease, disability, poverty, natural catastrophes, and criminals.

Heroism is also the strongest antidote to dehumanization of an outgroup.

For example, a muslim youth saves the grandmother of a white nationalist zealot from drowning in the floodwaters of a tropical storm in Texas. The moral reckoning of such an experience has the power to change their righteous beliefs against muslims.

2. Shaming of ingroup by outgroup

There are two related versions of this strategy. (a) Shaming for harm to shared primordial ingroups, or (b) harm to members of social groups that the ingroup aspires to belong to.

Primordial Ingroups

(a) Families, especially children, are a “primordial” social group — one we all share by virtue of our species and evolution. Our sympathy for primordial ingroups is why outgroups are dehumanized and demonized when a racist social group wants to target families. Strategy (a) is for the outsider group to make members of the ingroup feel shame towards each other by publicly exposing the harm they are doing to the families affected by their moral beliefs. This is the essence of the effectiveness of a Mahatma Ghandi or Martin Luther King. It is why terrorism, chemical weapons, and nuclear bombs are often considered to be at the top of the list of evil that mankind can do to itself, because of the harm they do to primordial ingroup.

For an example, consider immigration policies that have the side-effect of orphaning children from their parents. Despite millennia of creating racial and cultural distinctions to separate Us from Them, we cannot shut off our empathy when a family is harmed by someone undeniably in our own ingroup. When we see frontpage photos of a mother cut down by police or primetime TV coverage of black school girls stoned by their white classmates on their way to school, most of us are disgusted. Children, mothers, and grandparents transcend social group boundaries.

Racial dehumanization of a primordial ingroup can rarely overcome the moral outrage of witnessing their harm to families and children; to try to do so traumatizes a person for life with guilt and shame (some studies argue it causes PTSD).

Aspirational Belonging to Higher Status Social Groups

Sometimes it is not possible to get access to the documentary evidence or publicly distribute the message to generate the necessary feelings of shame in the political peer group (for example, in totalitarian states that control the media such as China). Strategy (b) is a workaround for (a). Instead if looking inwards to primordial social groups, it looks outwards to secondary social groups the ingroup aspires to belong to but who reject the righteous belief we want to change. The strategy is for the outgroup to make the ingroup look ridiculous, stupid, barbaric, uncultured, or weak to the public of that secondary social group.

For an example, in the 19th century China was shamed in the court of international opinion for the barbaric practice of footbinding. China wanted to be accepted as a modern international power, but footbinding was used by anti-China Western politicians to make them look cruel and primitive. The desire to belong to the international community, who vilified such practices, was stronger than that barbaric tradition. This is the true power of world economic and governmental bodies such as the United Nations or the Olympics to help make societies more progressive. And this is how most moral development progresses in children: to stay childlike too long is to incur the ridicule of adults (or school cliques) who have the power and status to which you aspire.

The role for Reason

The role that Reason plays in motivating moral change is by exposing the irrationality of treating ourselves differently from others (the Golden Rule: do unto others as they would have you do unto them). To quote Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?” The problem is that our appeals to reason influences very few people who did not already hold compatible righteous beliefs, and it is easy to renege under social pressure if Reason is the only thing backing your shift in allegiances. This was clearly understood by Enlightenment philosophers. “Reason is the handmaid of the passions”, wrote David Hume, pessimistically. It is often employed as a post hoc justification of why people changed their minds, it can explain one’s position, it can provide the humanist framework for educating children whose social group identities are not yet formed, but seldom do much work to change righteous beliefs unless the individual is highly rational and presented with a lot of evidence. For more on this topic, see Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Jonathan Haidt The Righteous Mind.

The preference for Heroism

What becomes clear, when comparing the tacks of Heroism and Shame, is that only Heroism provides the wanted benefit (changing a righteous belief) reliably. Shame, as we all experience through existing social media, enforces our own righteous beliefs and enforces the righteous beliefs of the conflicting ingroup by reinforcing the divide between the ingroup and outgroup. This is because the Shame, if originally individuated, becomes broadened to the point that it loses efficacy through the memetic sharing of that Shame. Heroism, on the other hand, is difficult to undermine without creating a false narrative, and will at least result in the individuals receiving said Heroism having a directly altered perspective on the inherent humanity of the outgroup acting upon them.

Shame results in the all-too-common rebuttal: ‘So much for the inclusive Left.’ As the ingroup being shamed sees the shaming as evidence of an expected intolerance or disdain. But an act of Heroism is far more difficult to rebuff, though denial or fictionalization of reality are clear issues in that regard. The point here is that for Shame to work, the shamed must desire be to loved by the Shamers. If they have previously rejected or set themselves apart from the Shamers, then the Shame simply becomes additional evidence for why the Shamers ought be rejected in the first place. But Heroism, an act of kindness or love, opens a door, calls the rejections and divides into question, and leaves an opportunity to converse honestly and fairly, and sometimes to convert a set of beliefs entirely.

Further down the rabbit hole

If you liked this sketch of how to create a more inclusive society, you might like to see how it fits into a generalized theory of how to derive The Golden Rule from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, in Communion: A Manifesto.

Thanks to Nate Ragolia and Antoine Valot for suggested edits to this post.