In response to your request for “some ‘aha’ moments you had about things you define as real or impossible that you now realize are probably imaginary,” I want to report that I’ve learned the benefits of “leaving the room.” I’ve learned that some debates don’t need to be won; they simply need to be exited. A gadfly promotes a surface-level opinion based on a nonsense framework. They do this especially when making negative judgments about someone else’s identity: gender, sexuality, race, disability, immigration status, etc. They might say, for example, “Gay people are possessed by demons,” or any number of statements that may perhaps seem less inflammatory and ridiculous but are ultimately just as unverifiable, nonsensical, and harmful. The gadfly lacks good understanding of the actual issue. They are probably motivated less by curiosity of other people’s reality and more by their desire to maintain their self-satisfaction in their own bubble in which they don’t have to be open to new realities. And they want me to engage them on their terms? I’ve wasted untold hours of my life trying to respond to such people and demolish their arguments on their own terms. It never works, because, for them, lacking understanding is the point. They don’t want to learn more because they don’t want to share knowledge and power with others. When they issued a negative judgment, it wasn’t a good-faith effort to be in dialogue. They were only trying to assert their own power and the intensity of their resistance to listening and empathy.
What can I do in response to it? Realize how to best spend my energy. I may be inclined to try to expose the flaws in the claims they’re making, but that’s really an impossible task since they weren’t trying very hard to say truthful things to begin with and aren’t listening to anything I say. Instead, I can say “no, that’s not true,” walk away, invest my energy into articulating frameworks that I believe to be true and accurate, and talk with people who might listen and who believe it’s possible to live in a better, kinder world.
To illustrate it another way: An adversary suddenly appears, issuing assumptions, judgments, opinions, arguments, insults, etc. that seem to block my way. Their bigotry looks like a hard, thick wall. At first I knock at the door asking for passage. The adversary just laughs at me. Then I chip away at the wall. It falls to pieces, but the adversary just throws up another wall in its place. I can’t make progress; it’s impossible. Then I realize: This wall is imaginary. I can walk around it. I can walk through it. Someone’s nonsense opinions about me do not actually constrain me. Bigotry has as much power as is collectively given to it. If I want other people to ignore these untruths, then I, too, have to demonstrate the right use of attention, glancing at the untruths and quickly moving on. Spending my entire day trying to dismantle the untruths is an impossible fight.
