Hello, and welcome to all the new folks who have subscribed in the past week or two! Fair warning: unlike all these other writers on Substack who seem to know what they’re doing, I’m totally just a normal person who is completely winging it here. I try to get posts up once every week or two; I have one in the works that I know you’ll all love! (Or not… that’s life!)
As a way for us to get to know each other a bit better, here’s a discussion prompt: What’s the biggest issue/topic/belief you’ve ever changed your mind about? What led you to change your mind?
I stopped identifying with a political party, and I stopped thinking of politics in black-and-white terms, in which there are only Goodies and Baddies. An enormous amount of my thinking has taken on shades of gray it didn't previously have, just generally, as I've gotten older. I don't know that any one thing in particular changed my mind, but I can relate the gist of how I became more skeptical and less politically identified.
At some point, the rhetoric I was hearing just became egregiously bad-faith enough that doubt wormed its way into my mind. I just couldn't get myself to believe that everyone who thought differently about certain things was truly as ill-intentioned and stupid as I was being told they were. It didn't match my experiences in the real world, and my bullshit detector finally went off. So, I stopped taking my side's word on it, and I actively sought to find out what The Baddies really thought, in their own words.
It turned out that, though there are indeed some bad apples (as there inevitably are in any group of humans), they seem to be mostly well-intentioned, average people doing the best they can. And their views are much more reasonable, on the whole, than I'd been led by my side (at the time) to believe. In short, the other side was human too. I also started noticing more and more bad behavior from my own side that I had previously excused in various ways, and I saw the hypocrisy.
So, even though many of my practical, on-the-ground policy views haven't changed all that much, I don't identify with a side anymore, and I'm much more skeptical about claims either side makes about the other. I do my best to see people as individuals now and not just as proxies for other things, though I don't always succeed, I'm sure. Sometimes it can feel pretty lonely and alienating to not claim a tribe in our increasingly polarized age, but I nevertheless feel a certain sense of peace in striving to live by my own values and not just adhering to prescribed opinions.
Great question, hope people are willing to offer up answers.
I was virulently anti-union until the age of 21. I thought a union was a tool to allow lazy people to remain employed, and that hard workers like me would only be hindered by one.
At 21, I went to work in a factory. My plan was to save up enough money for law school, and to cover living expenses while attending, so I wouldn't have to work full time like I did as an undergrad. I was the broke child of a single mother, and scared to death of taking on debt.
Anyway, I don't want to go on too long. In my 3rd (and I thought final) year there, my co-workers tried to organize. We were working 7 days/week, mandatory, for 2 years. No one received any raises during that time. I personally couldn't believe the contempt with which management treated people. Employee handbooks are meaningless, they can do as they like. Unless you can prove some type of discrimination, you'll take it and like it.
I'd come far enough by then that I told one of the pro-union guys "you have my vote, but I want no further involvement.". They lost the election. The union in question had sent an organizer who was 5 minutes from retirement, uninspired and uninspiring.
The night of the election, the plant manager was wandering around during the 11pm-7am shift, gloating. He had a couple of armed goons at the entrances of the plant in case there was "trouble " (there was never going to be any trouble, all of this was gratuitous assholery). He had an encounter with a deeply decent worker there that had me angry, then he and I had an encounter. Afterwards, I approached one of the pro-union team, told him that if I didn't get fired the next day, I'd like to join in when they called the union about having another organizing campaign, and another election in a year (you have to wait one year after an election to have another).
They sent us an outstanding organizer, who had further organizing support from time to time. I was heavily involved, house visits etc, got to spend lots of time with our organizer. The next year we won.
Several people, including our lead organizer, encouraged me to run for a spot on the bargaining committee. I did, and won. I had long since saved up as much money as I intended, btw, but continued working there. On top of that, negotiations took another year :). But I have no regrets. We got an outstanding contract, almost unbelievably good, and it was ratified unanimously. 20+ years later, still one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Everyone there, including me, had misconceptions about unions, and learned a lot. Thing is, a union is what you and your local co-workers decide to make it. As I'm sure some people know, it's not some outside organization coming in to run things. They send someone to help negotiate a contract, but the content of that contract is up to you and the co-workers that you elect to represent you.
A strange thing is: even before we had a contract, after the election, our management began behaving like adults, and treated us as adults. And the people who worked there responded in kind. The place had been morally ill, for lack of a better term, and everyone had known it.
Anyway, I landed in a job organizing with lefty groups other than unions for several years, then did some union organizing after that (still no law school!). I'm now working as an engineer, closer to The Man than to the workers, technically, but I still feel more at home on the floor and I feel like people can see that, and respond to it. I end up with lots of info that they shouldn't be telling management, but I try to use it wisely, and never out my sources.
Even back then, and now, I was not and am not pro-union 100% of the time (if you're working on a mayoral campaign in NY, a union is probably counterproductive. For Insta). But the balance of power in American workplaces is entirely tilted towards management. And in ridding themselves of risk, they have shifted all of the risk to the folks in the bottom. I'm a little put out by people who are afraid of the government. Our employers are so much more invasive. We are badly in need of a corrective.
Democrats made a huge mistake, throwing unions overboard. Their best shot at having boots on the ground all over the country (as Republicans have with churches, Chambers of Commerce, etc), and they abandoned them and allowed them to atrophy. The labor influence in the political process is so important. During every SC Justice confirmation hearing, we behave as if the proposed Justice will only make decisions about abortion, perhaps about LGBTQ+ issues. Meanwhile, they have stripped workers of rights over and over, and handed the country over to corporations and the wealthy.
Anyway, didn't mean to compose both a novella and a rant. My apologies. But obviously I made a 180° turn on labor/unions.
It's not one specific thing, but as I get older I am more convinced that the ability to solve problems as a group is harder but more important than people's individual abilities to solve problems.
I think this might be common. When I was in my teens and twenties I was a weirdo in various ways and hung out with other weirdos (mostly TT gamers and geeks) and I liked the idea of a world in which everybody just gets to do their own thing -- and I still like that vision, but I'm much more conscious of the ways that building things in the world requires having a group of people who can work together (and many bad things in the world are caused by toxic group dynamics more than toxic individuals.
"What philosophical pragmatism captures is that, whether it’s ethics, metaphysics, consciousness, or personal identity, Ultimate Truth doesn’t and can’t matter to us. We can’t experience it directly. We wouldn’t know for certain if we had. All we can experience is one another and our endlessly varying, conflicting ideas about the right perspectives and frames through which to view evidence and events. ... The real work is just figuring out how we can live together in something approximating peace and harmony, how we can improve our collective circumstances even in light of our inescapable differences."
Oh, all kinds of things. In high school we were explicitly taught that humans are born tabula rasa and that who you are is a result of your environment. Dealing with babies and small children will disabuse you of that notion right quick. Lots of "patterns of reactivity" are hardwired, and a lot of your personality and abilities are hardwired.
I have a lot of difficulty with this question. I've certainly changed my mind about a lot of things, but my difficulty is in the retrospective classification of that issue/topic/belief as "big".
I've changed my mind about things that I once thought were "big", but in retrospect I don't think of them that way anymore. It may be something close to a psychological precondition for changing your mind about something that you stop thinking of it as big.
Initially, I was going to talk about how I now like a lot of vegetables are used to hate, everything from turnips and rutabagas to Swiss chard. (My low opinion of beets hasn’t changed.) These things are important in terms of increasing harmony in the house I share with someone who takes the “omni” in omnivore with marked seriousness but has little to do with the outside world.
In terms of earth shattering topics, I have to list the idea of “taking a knee” during conventionally patriotic ceremonies. I know that most people who take a knee are sincere in their belief that they are exercising a sacred right. I used to share the view that this action was a desperately needed way of demonstrating depth of feeling to others and thus was worth the heartburn it has caused those in the flag waving camp.
I’m not so sure any more.
Taking a knee is a splendid way to cut off d bate with people who hold different views. Through countless discussions, generally without much acrimony, I’ve come to realize that for many, the flag and all that goes along with are important in a way that others simply don’t get. They view anything other than standing, saluting, and all the rest with an almost unthinkable level of fervency. Any attempt to persuade them to change their mind about other issues means meeting them where they are. That means standing up with your hand on your heart facing the flag whenever it is raised or whenever the national anthem is played.
The key issue here is to recognize that some issues are simply not worth fighting about, especially when you profess to share important opinions with others. Thus, few among us would debate the key doctrinal points of a religion while attending a grandparents funeral or the christening of a neighbor’s baby. We need to think of a better way to get the point of racial equity across to those who haven’t woken up yet.
I stopped identifying with a political party, and I stopped thinking of politics in black-and-white terms, in which there are only Goodies and Baddies. An enormous amount of my thinking has taken on shades of gray it didn't previously have, just generally, as I've gotten older. I don't know that any one thing in particular changed my mind, but I can relate the gist of how I became more skeptical and less politically identified.
At some point, the rhetoric I was hearing just became egregiously bad-faith enough that doubt wormed its way into my mind. I just couldn't get myself to believe that everyone who thought differently about certain things was truly as ill-intentioned and stupid as I was being told they were. It didn't match my experiences in the real world, and my bullshit detector finally went off. So, I stopped taking my side's word on it, and I actively sought to find out what The Baddies really thought, in their own words.
It turned out that, though there are indeed some bad apples (as there inevitably are in any group of humans), they seem to be mostly well-intentioned, average people doing the best they can. And their views are much more reasonable, on the whole, than I'd been led by my side (at the time) to believe. In short, the other side was human too. I also started noticing more and more bad behavior from my own side that I had previously excused in various ways, and I saw the hypocrisy.
So, even though many of my practical, on-the-ground policy views haven't changed all that much, I don't identify with a side anymore, and I'm much more skeptical about claims either side makes about the other. I do my best to see people as individuals now and not just as proxies for other things, though I don't always succeed, I'm sure. Sometimes it can feel pretty lonely and alienating to not claim a tribe in our increasingly polarized age, but I nevertheless feel a certain sense of peace in striving to live by my own values and not just adhering to prescribed opinions.
Great question, hope people are willing to offer up answers.
I was virulently anti-union until the age of 21. I thought a union was a tool to allow lazy people to remain employed, and that hard workers like me would only be hindered by one.
At 21, I went to work in a factory. My plan was to save up enough money for law school, and to cover living expenses while attending, so I wouldn't have to work full time like I did as an undergrad. I was the broke child of a single mother, and scared to death of taking on debt.
Anyway, I don't want to go on too long. In my 3rd (and I thought final) year there, my co-workers tried to organize. We were working 7 days/week, mandatory, for 2 years. No one received any raises during that time. I personally couldn't believe the contempt with which management treated people. Employee handbooks are meaningless, they can do as they like. Unless you can prove some type of discrimination, you'll take it and like it.
I'd come far enough by then that I told one of the pro-union guys "you have my vote, but I want no further involvement.". They lost the election. The union in question had sent an organizer who was 5 minutes from retirement, uninspired and uninspiring.
The night of the election, the plant manager was wandering around during the 11pm-7am shift, gloating. He had a couple of armed goons at the entrances of the plant in case there was "trouble " (there was never going to be any trouble, all of this was gratuitous assholery). He had an encounter with a deeply decent worker there that had me angry, then he and I had an encounter. Afterwards, I approached one of the pro-union team, told him that if I didn't get fired the next day, I'd like to join in when they called the union about having another organizing campaign, and another election in a year (you have to wait one year after an election to have another).
They sent us an outstanding organizer, who had further organizing support from time to time. I was heavily involved, house visits etc, got to spend lots of time with our organizer. The next year we won.
Several people, including our lead organizer, encouraged me to run for a spot on the bargaining committee. I did, and won. I had long since saved up as much money as I intended, btw, but continued working there. On top of that, negotiations took another year :). But I have no regrets. We got an outstanding contract, almost unbelievably good, and it was ratified unanimously. 20+ years later, still one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Everyone there, including me, had misconceptions about unions, and learned a lot. Thing is, a union is what you and your local co-workers decide to make it. As I'm sure some people know, it's not some outside organization coming in to run things. They send someone to help negotiate a contract, but the content of that contract is up to you and the co-workers that you elect to represent you.
A strange thing is: even before we had a contract, after the election, our management began behaving like adults, and treated us as adults. And the people who worked there responded in kind. The place had been morally ill, for lack of a better term, and everyone had known it.
Anyway, I landed in a job organizing with lefty groups other than unions for several years, then did some union organizing after that (still no law school!). I'm now working as an engineer, closer to The Man than to the workers, technically, but I still feel more at home on the floor and I feel like people can see that, and respond to it. I end up with lots of info that they shouldn't be telling management, but I try to use it wisely, and never out my sources.
Even back then, and now, I was not and am not pro-union 100% of the time (if you're working on a mayoral campaign in NY, a union is probably counterproductive. For Insta). But the balance of power in American workplaces is entirely tilted towards management. And in ridding themselves of risk, they have shifted all of the risk to the folks in the bottom. I'm a little put out by people who are afraid of the government. Our employers are so much more invasive. We are badly in need of a corrective.
Democrats made a huge mistake, throwing unions overboard. Their best shot at having boots on the ground all over the country (as Republicans have with churches, Chambers of Commerce, etc), and they abandoned them and allowed them to atrophy. The labor influence in the political process is so important. During every SC Justice confirmation hearing, we behave as if the proposed Justice will only make decisions about abortion, perhaps about LGBTQ+ issues. Meanwhile, they have stripped workers of rights over and over, and handed the country over to corporations and the wealthy.
Anyway, didn't mean to compose both a novella and a rant. My apologies. But obviously I made a 180° turn on labor/unions.
It's not one specific thing, but as I get older I am more convinced that the ability to solve problems as a group is harder but more important than people's individual abilities to solve problems.
I think this might be common. When I was in my teens and twenties I was a weirdo in various ways and hung out with other weirdos (mostly TT gamers and geeks) and I liked the idea of a world in which everybody just gets to do their own thing -- and I still like that vision, but I'm much more conscious of the ways that building things in the world requires having a group of people who can work together (and many bad things in the world are caused by toxic group dynamics more than toxic individuals.
My thinking on this also overlaps with this David Roberts post: https://www.volts.wtf/p/why-i-am-a-progressive
"What philosophical pragmatism captures is that, whether it’s ethics, metaphysics, consciousness, or personal identity, Ultimate Truth doesn’t and can’t matter to us. We can’t experience it directly. We wouldn’t know for certain if we had. All we can experience is one another and our endlessly varying, conflicting ideas about the right perspectives and frames through which to view evidence and events. ... The real work is just figuring out how we can live together in something approximating peace and harmony, how we can improve our collective circumstances even in light of our inescapable differences."
Oh, all kinds of things. In high school we were explicitly taught that humans are born tabula rasa and that who you are is a result of your environment. Dealing with babies and small children will disabuse you of that notion right quick. Lots of "patterns of reactivity" are hardwired, and a lot of your personality and abilities are hardwired.
I have a lot of difficulty with this question. I've certainly changed my mind about a lot of things, but my difficulty is in the retrospective classification of that issue/topic/belief as "big".
I've changed my mind about things that I once thought were "big", but in retrospect I don't think of them that way anymore. It may be something close to a psychological precondition for changing your mind about something that you stop thinking of it as big.
Initially, I was going to talk about how I now like a lot of vegetables are used to hate, everything from turnips and rutabagas to Swiss chard. (My low opinion of beets hasn’t changed.) These things are important in terms of increasing harmony in the house I share with someone who takes the “omni” in omnivore with marked seriousness but has little to do with the outside world.
In terms of earth shattering topics, I have to list the idea of “taking a knee” during conventionally patriotic ceremonies. I know that most people who take a knee are sincere in their belief that they are exercising a sacred right. I used to share the view that this action was a desperately needed way of demonstrating depth of feeling to others and thus was worth the heartburn it has caused those in the flag waving camp.
I’m not so sure any more.
Taking a knee is a splendid way to cut off d bate with people who hold different views. Through countless discussions, generally without much acrimony, I’ve come to realize that for many, the flag and all that goes along with are important in a way that others simply don’t get. They view anything other than standing, saluting, and all the rest with an almost unthinkable level of fervency. Any attempt to persuade them to change their mind about other issues means meeting them where they are. That means standing up with your hand on your heart facing the flag whenever it is raised or whenever the national anthem is played.
The key issue here is to recognize that some issues are simply not worth fighting about, especially when you profess to share important opinions with others. Thus, few among us would debate the key doctrinal points of a religion while attending a grandparents funeral or the christening of a neighbor’s baby. We need to think of a better way to get the point of racial equity across to those who haven’t woken up yet.
I’ve changed my mind about religion (I even went to a religious private university) and wokism, once I realized it was a new religion.
marrying and having children