Daryl Davis On Talking To People Who Hate You
Are we becoming less capable of persuasion?
If there was one word I’d use to describe the political discourse in our culture, it wouldn’t be “principled.”
I’ve been part of this discourse long enough to see people become cartoonishly extreme in their views, or flip them entirely. This trend only makes it more important to spend time listening to people who are principled and thoughtful in their handling of heated issues.
The people who are guided by virtue, principles, and ethics remind us why we bother doing the harder thing when everywhere you look, serious topics are handled by insulting everyone who disagrees with you and avoiding genuine debate.
Listening to Daryl Davis is like taking a flamethrower to your pessimism. If a black man can befriend and deradicalize dedicated white supremacists, we can all try a little harder to handle our disagreements in good faith.
I asked Daryl to answer three questions:
What's the best way to stay grounded in empathy and open dialogue when our instincts lead us to be hostile and closed-off?
Do we need to transcend and abandon the concept of racial identity, or does racial identity help us understand ourselves and our world?
Is “color-blindness” a trap used to subjugate racial minorities?
⏱️ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:47 Staying grounded in open dialogue when faced with offensive ideas
1:56 Speaking less with "I" and "You" vs. "We"
3:14 What role should race and considering race play in society?
4:03 What a Nazi leader once told Daryl
6:32 Daryl's disturbing prediction for the years leading up to 2042
9:08 Is focusing on "shared humanity" a trap?
Iain McGilchrist writes about how reality is inherently paradoxical. This is similar to what makes good art: contrast and the unexpected.
So when I say what has been said for millennia—that the people worth listening to aren’t the loudest, most famous, or most extreme—I hope you’ll be one of the few who understand.
Similarly, I’ve partnered with an app called Integrally on this series because it offers the same kind of quiet wisdom people like Daryl do. Integrally facilitates anonymous, constructive disagreements that get evaluated on the quality of their reasoning rather than their popularity. It’s great for testing your own ideas through disagreement and refining your debate skills without drama, outrage, and irrationality. Join me there and test out the techniques Daryl shared.
🧠 Follow Integrally to add more thoughtful content to your newsfeed:
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Some unity and common sense good faith call to action for you two good folks on a crisp January Sarurday:
"The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country Not Theirs
This nation belongs to the people who live here and work here and raise families here and will be buried here. It does not belong to billionaires who hold citizenship in three countries and will flee to their bunkers the moment things get bad. It does not belong to tech oligarchs who view democracy as an obstacle to efficiency. It does not belong to foreign interests who have purchased so much influence that they might as well be writing our laws themselves.
We have to stop letting them divide us. We have to start seeing each other as fellow Americans again instead of enemy combatants in a culture war that was manufactured to keep us weak. We have to remember that the person screaming at us online is also a victim of the same manipulation, and maybe if we stopped screaming back and started talking, we might realize we have been fighting the wrong enemy this entire time.
Turn off the television. It is not informing you. It is programming you. Question everything, including the sources you trust, especially the sources you trust. Talk to people who disagree with you and do it without trying to win. Listen to why they believe what they believe. You might discover that the monster you have been told to hate is actually just another person trying to make sense of a confusing world with imperfect information, exactly like you.
Remember who you are. You are an American. Your ancestors came to this land or were brought to this land or were already on this land, and regardless of how they got here, they built something together that was supposed to be different from the old world’s tyrannies and aristocracies. That project is not finished. Every generation has to fight to keep it alive against the forces that want to drag us back to a world where a handful of rulers own everything and everyone else serves at their pleasure.
Stop letting them divide you. Your enemies are not your neighbors. Your enemies are the people who profit from your division and are building machines to replace you the moment you are no longer useful.
Start acting like it before it is too late". —The Wise Wolf