David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

patri friedman

Can you spot the change in this video? Most can’t — and most don’t notice the world changing, either

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We all trust our senses to keep us aware of what’s going on around us, but sometimes things happen gradually enough that we can’t even tell major change has happened until it’s too late. Watch this video and see whether you can see the change happening right in front of your eyes. I didn’t notice until at the end when the change is made obvious. Of course, when I watched it the second time, I knew what to look for.

That’s the way change in the world works, too. When you’re looking to the future, you almost never see what’s really coming. But when you’re looking back at what’s already happened, it’s easy to spot the change and to believe you would have known what was going on if you’d been there.

It’s easy to think the German people in 1932 must have known what Adolph Hitler was going to represent. It’s easy to think that the U.S. president who made the early decisions to commit the United States in Vietnam must have known what it would lead to. It’s easy to think that the intellectuals and liberal-minded people who supported Fidel Castro in Cuba must have known the kind of brutal dictator he would be.

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If you want to win a chess match, you have to play chess, not lecture the other players

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If changing the world were about winning debates, libertarians would have brought freedom to the masses long ago. The vast majority of libertarians I know are scary smart and can make convincing and rational arguments for their positions. The only problem is that changing the world has little to do with winning debates.

I have to confess that it’s hard for me to keep my mouth shut when someone makes what seems like a ridiculous argument. My natural instinct is to point out the flaws in an argument and to lay out the facts and logic from my point of view. I have to confess that this approach has never changed the mind of a single person I know. What’s worse, reacting in my natural way has made me look like a jerk a time or two. Or three. Well, OK. Way more than that.

Dale Carnegie famously said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” In other words, even if you’re able to logically prove a point — and get someone else to admit that your logic is correct along the way — the typical person isn’t going to change what he believes in his heart. That’s a lesson that’s hard for hard-headed libertarians to learn.

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