When Convincing Becomes More Important Than Understanding

Recently, I came across a post on social media that said:

“I don’t argue about politics. After all, if Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, who am I to go to the other side? And don’t bother me.”

It is an efficient sentence.

In just a few words, it manages to bring together Jesus, God, politics, identity, an electoral conclusion, and even shut down the debate before anyone has the inconvenience of responding.

That is no small achievement.

It does not matter here who wrote or shared the post. Nor does it matter whether that person identifies politically with the right or the left. We could find equally fragile constructions defending virtually any ideology.

What is interesting lies elsewhere.

There is a small trick hidden in that sentence.

And it is not in Jesus.

Nor is it in the right.

It is in the almost invisible path that leads from one to the other.

When Christian tradition says that Jesus sits “at the right hand of the Father,” the word “right” does not refer to a position on the contemporary political spectrum. It is a religious image associated with honor, authority, and proximity to God.

The political division between left and right emerged many centuries later, under entirely different historical circumstances.

But the sentence joins the two:

Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father.

Therefore, the right is Jesus’s side.

If Jesus is on that side, I should be politically on that side.

It is an admirably economical solution to several centuries of political philosophy.

Economics, inequality, individual liberty, the role of government, property, income distribution, public policy? We can dispense with all of that. Apparently, all we needed to know was where Jesus was sitting.

Naturally, a small cartographic problem arises.

Right in relation to whom?

If we are facing God, wouldn’t His right be on our left?

Perhaps it would be wise not to turn the Kingdom of Heaven into an electoral map before clarifying the orientation of the floor plan.

The joke exposes the problem: there is no logical relationship between the two meanings of the word “right.”

And yet the sentence works.

Perhaps that is precisely what makes it so interesting.

Because what it loses in logic, it may gain in psychological efficiency.

For someone whose identity is deeply associated with Christianity, the path being offered is incomparably shorter:

Jesus → good → right → correct choice.

And silently, another path appears as well:

other side → left → distance from Jesus.

Done.

Politics is no longer being examined. It is being identified.

The recipient was not given enough information to construct a conclusion. The recipient was given a ready-made conclusion, emotionally connected to one of the most important figures in their belief system.

That is not informing.

It is influencing.

And before anyone concludes that this is an elaborate way of attacking the political right, we have another problem to examine.

The Problem Is Not Being on the Right

We could reverse the example completely.

Replace Jesus with “democracy,” “science,” “the poor,” “the Constitution,” “freedom,” “fascism,” “social justice,” or any word powerful enough to carry a moral identity.

The mechanism still works.

My group comes to represent democracy.

Therefore, anyone who opposes my group threatens democracy.

My group represents science.

Therefore, questioning a claim made by my group means being against science.

My group represents freedom.

Therefore, anyone who disagrees with me is an enemy of freedom.

It is an extraordinarily convenient mechanism.

First, we appropriate a virtue. Then we let it do the heavy lifting.

We do not need to demonstrate that our position is democratic, scientific, just, or free in every circumstance. We only need to build a sufficiently strong association between the word and our identity.

The opposing side will probably do exactly the same thing.

And that is how we can arrive at the curious situation in which two politically opposed groups simultaneously accuse each other of being anti-democratic while both claim to be saving democracy.

Poor democracy watches the argument while being kidnapped by both sides.

In polarized communication, words such as “democratic,” “anti-democratic,” “constitutional,” “unconstitutional,” “freedom,” and “justice” still appear to mean the same thing.

But they begin to inhabit different universes.

Each group sees the world through its own interpretive structure.

So far, nothing extraordinary. We all do this.

The problem begins when we stop noticing that we are interpreting.

And this is where we need to talk about lucidity.

What I Mean Here by Lucidity

Lucidity, in this essay, does not mean intelligence.

Nor does it mean education, erudition, or the amount of information someone has accumulated.

A person can be extraordinarily intelligent and not particularly lucid.

They may know history, politics, religion, and psychology in great depth and use all of that knowledge merely to construct increasingly sophisticated arguments in defense of what they already believed.

They may even understand very well how the human mind works — especially other people’s minds.

Their own, not so much.

That is intellectual ability. It may be strategic intelligence. Under certain circumstances, it may make someone an excellent manipulator.

It is not necessarily lucidity.

By lucidity, I mean an expanded capacity to perceive reality while continuously recognizing an inconvenient fact:

we have no access to it without passing through ourselves.

We do not simply see the world.

We interpret the world.

And the equipment doing the interpreting has a history.

Family. Language. Culture. Religion. Education. Trauma. Rewards. Fears. Groups we belong to. The era into which we were born. People we admire. People we learned to hate.

All of this participated in the construction of what we now, with admirable simplicity, call “I.”

Being lucid, therefore, does not mean installing an update in the brain and finally seeing the universe without interference.

It means becoming progressively more capable of noticing those interferences at work.

It means observing not only what I think, but asking:

Why does this seem so obviously true to me?

It means being able to examine a religious belief without needing to be religious or anti-religious in order to understand it.

To examine an idea from the left without needing to become left-wing.

To understand a conservative proposition without needing to defend it.

To move through different sciences, philosophies, cultures, and historical periods, looking for what each perspective allows us to see — and what it leaves invisible.

Lucidity is not an absolute cosmic viewpoint.

Probably no one will ever receive a certificate declaring them “the human being who finally understood everything.”

It is a direction.

The more we manage to escape the exclusive prison of our own experience, the more perspectives we incorporate into our representation of reality.

And the broader that representation becomes, the greater our capacity tends to be to perceive relationships, consequences, and contradictions that previously did not even exist for us.

But there is an important detail.

This investigation did not begin when we were born.

Consciousness Did Not Begin with Us

None of us started intellectually from zero.

Fortunately.

It would be rather exhausting to watch someone discover fire every Monday.

Long before we were born, countless generations observed the world, made mistakes, died because of some of them, discovered regularities, invented techniques, developed languages, religions, philosophies, institutions, arts, and sciences.

One generation received information from the previous one, modified it, and passed something on to the next.

The wheel does not need to be reinvented by every child.

Writing allowed one consciousness to converse with another that had not even been born yet.

Books expanded that possibility enormously.

Institutions organized specialized knowledge.

Science developed mechanisms through which some claims could be subjected to more rigorous forms of confrontation with reality.

Metaphorically, we can think of humanity’s collective consciousness as something that has been continuously updated.

It is not a particularly orderly update.

Sometimes we install a better version.

Sometimes we reinstall a two-thousand-year-old error and present it as something new.

There are advances, regressions, destructions, forgotten knowledge, and reconstructions.

But there is cultural accumulation.

For that reason, a lucid individual consciousness could hardly use only its few years of personal experience as the measure of all things.

It tries to incorporate something from the experience of other consciousnesses, other societies, and other eras.

When we do that, some disputes that seem absolutely unprecedented begin to look uncomfortably familiar.

And then we invented the internet.

The Internet, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence

Over the past few decades, three transformations have radically altered our ability to produce and transmit information.

The internet connected.

Social media gave people a voice.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to provide the capacity for elaboration.

It is difficult to overstate the potential of this.

It is also difficult to overstate our ability to take an extraordinary tool and use it to do exactly the same foolish things we were already doing — only faster.

The internet allowed information to cross borders at unprecedented speed, although governments, corporations, cultures, and political and economic interests continue to create filters, controls, and asymmetries.

Then came social media.

Millions of people who had previously been primarily receivers became broadcasters as well.

This democratized communication.

And because democracy tends to be rather inclusive, it also democratized prejudice, misinformation, resentment, oversimplification, and tribalism.

Everyone got a pulpit.

Some had extraordinary things to say.

Others simply got a pulpit.

Now we have reached another stage.

Artificial intelligence allows a person with limited argumentative ability to produce apparently sophisticated texts.

That can be extraordinarily positive.

Someone can use it to organize thoughts, challenge hypotheses, find contradictions, search for evidence, and discover perspectives they had never considered.

But they can also do exactly the opposite.

I can arrive with my favorite prejudice, ask for confirmation, reject everything that makes me uncomfortable, and use artificial intelligence to transform a bad idea I could barely explain into a flawlessly presented piece of writing.

Prejudice just got grammar.

And perhaps a bibliography.

Technology has expanded our capacity for elaboration.

It has not necessarily expanded our lucidity.

Perhaps we are entering a peculiar era:

bad arguments may be presented increasingly well.

And that brings us to a rather ambitious cell.

The Cell That Forgets the Body

Imagine a cell in the human body.

Our cell is efficient.

Very efficient.

It wants resources. It wants space. It wants to grow. It wants to reproduce. And it is succeeding.

If it had a quarterly presentation for investors, the charts would probably look excellent.

Growth above expectations.

Territorial expansion.

Record resource acquisition.

Outstanding prospects for the next quarter.

There is only one small problem.

The organism is dying.

For a cell that measures success exclusively by its own expansion, that may look like a minor administrative detail.

But we know the name we give, in certain biological contexts, to cells that abandon systemic cooperation and begin growing uncontrollably.

The point of the metaphor is not to turn politics into oncology.

It is to recognize the difference between local efficiency and systemic understanding.

The individual also exists within systems on which they depend.

Family. Community. Society. Culture. Economy. Ecosystem.

We can be extraordinarily efficient at obtaining something for ourselves while simultaneously degrading the system that makes that achievement possible.

The greater our lucidity, the greater our capacity should be to recognize that what we do to others does not happen in a universe separate from the one in which we ourselves live.

It is in this sense that responsibility and lucidity begin to move closer together.

Not because a lucid person must obey some predetermined moral code.

But because, as our understanding of interdependence increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that continuously manipulating, degrading, or disorganizing the human environment around us will produce no systemic consequences.

A cell capable of understanding the organism would recognize something fairly simple:

preserving the organism is also part of preserving itself.

And now we can return to that Facebook post.

Because we have still overlooked the most interesting part.

Influencing Without Informing

Let us recall the sentence:

“If Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, who am I to go to the other side?”

What cognitive freedom is being offered to the recipient?

Practically none.

Different perspectives are not presented.

Information is not provided.

Advantages and disadvantages are not laid out.

Investigation is not invited.

A religious identity is used to produce political adherence.

But perhaps the most revealing part of the post is not that.

It is the final four words:

“And don’t bother me.”

Here the message manages a curious feat.

I want to enter your consciousness, but I close the door to mine.

I exercise my freedom to influence you, but I do not reciprocally offer the openness for you to influence me.

I have a conclusion to transmit.

I am not interested in the process through which our different representations of reality might come into contact and, perhaps, modify one another.

It is almost like sending a letter with a destination address but no return address.

And this reveals a problem much larger than that particular post.

Argument or Cognitive Cooperation?

A great deal of political conversation seems to be organized like a war.

I arrive carrying A.

You arrive carrying B.

From that point on, apparently, we have two missions.

I need to protect A and destroy B.

You need to protect B and destroy A.

If you demonstrate a flaw in my argument, I have lost.

If I acknowledge something correct in your argument, I have conceded.

If I change my mind, I have been defeated.

It is a curious system because it transforms one of the most valuable things that can happen in a conversation — discovering that we are wrong — into failure.

Imagine another model.

I arrive with A.

You arrive with B.

But neither of us has signed a contract requiring us to leave the conversation carrying exactly what we brought into it.

We put A and B on the table.

We put pressure on both.

We discover where A explains reality better.

We discover where B notices something A ignored.

We find contradictions.

We incorporate information.

We discard what does not work.

Perhaps we end up with C.

And C may be a representation that neither of us would have been capable of producing alone.

That is something quite different from an argument.

We might call it cognitive cooperation.

In this model, your demonstrating that I am wrong is not necessarily an attack.

It may be a gift.

You have just helped me abandon a less adequate representation of reality.

Naturally, this becomes much more difficult when what I think stops being something I have and becomes what I am.

If my idea is my identity, attacking my idea feels like attacking me.

But if I can observe my own ideas as provisional constructions, I can allow some of them to die without having to die with them.

Perhaps this is one of the most important manifestations of lucidity.

And perhaps it also helps explain why our new technologies have not solved a very old problem.

The Problem Is Old; the Tools Are New

It would be comforting to blame social media.

It certainly makes the job much easier.

But tribalism, dogmatism, propaganda, persecution of those who are different, and the fusion of belief with identity were not born with the “Like” button.

We were already doing all of that when the greatest technological innovation in conversation was a campfire.

What changed was the infrastructure.

The internet dramatically increased connectivity.

Social media dramatically increased the individual capacity to publish and made it possible to form identity-based communities almost instantly.

Now artificial intelligence is beginning to dramatically increase the individual capacity for elaboration and persuasion.

Perhaps we are passing through a period of imbalance between communicative power and the maturity required to use it.

We keep handing increasingly powerful megaphones to a species that is still learning not to shout.

Technology has evolved faster than our collective ability to understand all the psychological and social consequences of using it.

But that does not mean we will necessarily remain this way.

Human systems also respond to the imbalances they create.

New cultural norms, forms of education, technologies, and modes of interaction may emerge precisely because we begin to recognize the problems created by the ones that came before.

There is simply no reason to imagine that technology will do this automatically for us.

And perhaps we can begin with a very simple question.

A question that, despite its simplicity, can be uncomfortably difficult to answer.

Perhaps the Most Important Question Is Not “Which Side Are You On?”

Perhaps it is:

What would have to happen for you to recognize that you were wrong?

Do not think only about your opponent.

The question is for us.

What would it take?

One piece of evidence?

Ten?

The opinion of someone we trust?

A personal experience?

A contradiction we can no longer resolve?

Is there anything capable of changing our conclusion?

Because if the answer is “nothing,” something important has happened.

We are no longer investigating reality.

We are protecting an identity.

A lucid person still has beliefs, preferences, attachments, a personal history, limitations, and biases.

They have not transcended their humanity.

The difference lies elsewhere.

They try to notice these forces operating within themselves.

They try to incorporate perspectives that did not arise from their own experience.

They try to look at the present through the lens of history.

They try to see the other person not simply as an opponent, but as another consciousness carrying a partial representation of the same reality.

And, above all, they remain capable of revising themselves.

That is why, taken literally and absent some exceptional context we do not know, it is extremely unlikely that a message such as:

“Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, so who am I to go to the other side? And don’t bother me.”

would be an expression of lucidity in the sense defined here.

Not because it chose the wrong side.

But because there was almost no cognitive choice at all in the structure offered by the message.

There is an association.

An identity.

A conclusion.

And a closed door.

Perhaps the greatest problem with human polarization is not that people look at reality from different places.

That is inevitable.

And it can be extraordinarily productive.

The problem begins when we stop using those differences to expand one another’s representations of the world and start using them only to defend what we already believed before the conversation began.

At that point, we stop thinking together.

We are merely competing to see which consciousness can impose its own interpretation of reality on the other.