When Convincing Becomes More Important Than Understanding

I recently came across a social media post that read:

“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 brings together Jesus, God, politics, identity, a voting decision, and even shuts down the debate before anyone has the audacity to respond.

It does not matter who wrote or shared the post, or whether that person identifies with the right or the left; we could find equally flimsy arguments supporting practically any ideology. What matters is the trick hidden in the sentence, and it lies neither in Jesus nor in the right. It lies in the almost invisible path from one to the other.

When Christian tradition says that Jesus sits “at the right hand of the Father,” the word “right” does not designate a position on the political spectrum. It is a religious image associated with honor, authority, and closeness to God. The political distinction between left and right emerged many centuries later, under entirely different historical circumstances. But the sentence joins the two: Jesus is at the Father’s right hand, so the right is Jesus’s side, so that must be where I belong politically. It is an admirably economical solution to several centuries of political philosophy. Economics, inequality, individual liberty, the role of government, property, public policy? We can skip all of that. We just needed to find out where Jesus was sitting.

There is just one small mapping problem: whose right? If we are facing God, wouldn’t his right be on our left? Perhaps we should clarify the floor plan before turning the Kingdom of Heaven into an electoral map.

The joke highlights the lack of a logical connection between the word’s two meanings. And yet the sentence works. What it loses in logic, it gains in psychological efficiency. For someone whose identity is deeply tied to Christianity, it offers an incomparably shorter route: Jesus → good → right → correct choice. And, quietly, another route appears: the other side → left → away from Jesus. Politics is no longer being examined; it is being identified with something else. The reader has not been given information from which to draw a conclusion, but a ready-made conclusion emotionally attached 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 right, there is another problem to examine.

The Problem Is Not Being on the Right

Replace Jesus with “democracy,” “science,” “the Constitution,” “freedom,” “fascism,” “social justice,” or any word powerful enough to carry a moral identity, and the mechanism still works. My group represents democracy, so anyone who opposes it threatens democracy. My group represents science, so questioning one of its claims means being against science. My group represents freedom, so anyone who disagrees with me is an enemy of freedom.

To see that the structure does not belong to just one side, imagine a made-up version from the other camp: “I don’t argue about politics. After all, if Jesus stood up for the poor, who am I to vote for the other side? And don’t bother me.” It is the same machine: a figure with moral weight, a voting decision, and a closed door.

It is a convenient mechanism: first we claim a virtue, then we let it do the heavy lifting. We do not need to demonstrate, case by case, that our position is democratic, scientific, fair, or free; a strong association between the word and our identity will do. Our opponents will probably do the same, which is how we arrive at the curious situation in which two opposing groups accuse each other of being antidemocratic while both claim to be saving democracy. Poor democracy watches the argument while being held hostage by both sides.

In polarized communication, words like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “justice” still seem to mean the same thing, but they start inhabiting different universes, because each group sees the world through its own interpretive framework. Nothing unusual about that: we all do it. The problem begins when we stop noticing that we are interpreting.

What I Mean Here by Lucidity

In this essay, lucidity does not mean intelligence, education, erudition, or accumulated information. A person can be extraordinarily intelligent and lack lucidity: they may know history, politics, religion, and psychology inside out and use all that knowledge solely to build ever stronger arguments for what they already believed. They may even understand the human mind very well, especially other people’s minds. Their own, not so much. That is intellectual ability, and in certain circumstances it can make someone an excellent manipulator. It is not necessarily lucidity.

By lucidity I mean an expanded capacity to perceive reality while continually acknowledging an inconvenience: we cannot access it without going through ourselves. We do not simply see the world; we interpret it. And the equipment doing the interpreting has a history: family, language, culture, religion, education, trauma, rewards, fears, the groups we belong to, the era we were born into, the people we admire, and the people we learned to hate. All of this helped construct what, with remarkable simplicity, we call “me.”

Being lucid, then, does not mean installing a brain update and finally seeing the universe without interference. It means becoming able to notice that interference at work. It means asking not only what I think, but why this seems so obviously true to me. It means being able to examine a religious belief without being religious or antireligious in order to understand it, consider a left-wing idea without becoming a leftist, understand a conservative proposition without having to defend it, and move among sciences, philosophies, cultures, and eras, looking for what each perspective reveals and what it leaves invisible.

Lucidity is not an absolute cosmic view; nobody will receive a certificate declaring them “the human being who finally understood everything.” It is a direction. The further we move beyond the confines of our own experience, the more perspectives we incorporate into our representation of reality, and the greater our capacity tends to be to perceive relationships, consequences, and contradictions that previously did not exist for us.

Consciousness Did Not Begin with Us

If lucidity means broadening our perspectives, those perspectives have to come from somewhere. None of us started intellectually from scratch, and thank goodness; watching someone rediscover fire every Monday would get exhausting. Before we were born, countless generations observed the world, made mistakes, discovered patterns, and created technologies, languages, religions, philosophies, institutions, arts, and sciences. Writing allowed one consciousness to converse with another that had not yet been born; science developed ways of testing certain claims more rigorously against reality.

Cultural knowledge accumulates, however untidily: sometimes we incorporate a discovery; sometimes we reinstall an old mistake and present it as something new. Expanding our representation of the world therefore also requires drawing on the experience of other societies and other eras. When we do, some disputes that seem unprecedented begin to look uncomfortably familiar.

The Cell That Forgets the Body

Imagine a cell in the human body that wants resources, space, growth, and reproduction, and is getting them. If it gave a quarterly investor presentation, the charts would look excellent: growth exceeding expectations, territorial expansion, record fundraising. There is just one problem: the organism is dying. We know what we call cells that, in certain biological contexts, abandon systemic cooperation and grow out of control.

The point is not to turn politics into oncology, but to distinguish local efficiency from an understanding of the larger system. We, too, exist within systems we depend on: family, community, society, culture, the economy, the ecosystem. We can be very efficient at getting something for ourselves while degrading the system that makes that achievement possible. As we recognize these interdependencies, responsibility and lucidity draw closer: preserving the system we depend on is also, to some extent, preserving ourselves.

Influencing Without Informing

Let us return to the sentence: “If Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, who am I to go to the other side?” How much room does it offer the reader to think? Almost none. It presents no perspectives, supplies no information, weighs no advantages or disadvantages, and invites no investigation. It uses a religious identity to generate political allegiance. Someone will say it was only a joke, and perhaps it was. But even a joke influences people, and its tone does not remove responsibility for its effects.

The most revealing part, however, is the final instruction: “And don’t bother me.” The message pulls off a curious feat: I want to enter your consciousness, but I shut the door to mine. I exercise my freedom to influence you without offering you the same opportunity to influence me. I have a conclusion to deliver and no interest in the process through which our representations of reality might meet and, perhaps, change one another. It is a letter with a recipient but no return address.

Debate or Cognitive Cooperation?

Many political conversations seem organized like warfare. I arrive carrying A, you arrive carrying B, and we have two missions: I must protect A and destroy B; you must protect B and destroy A. If you expose a flaw in my argument, I lose. If I acknowledge something right in yours, I give ground. If I change my mind, I have been defeated. It is a curious system, because it turns one of the most valuable things that could 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 carrying what we brought. We put A and B on the table and challenge both. We discover where A explains reality better and where B notices something A overlooked, find contradictions, incorporate information, and discard what does not work. Perhaps we end up with C, a representation neither of us would have produced alone. Not every conversation ends in C, of course: sometimes A or B is simply right, and cooperation means recognizing that. We can call this model cognitive cooperation. In it, your showing me that I am wrong is not necessarily an attack; it can be a gift, because you have just helped me abandon a less adequate representation of reality.

This becomes much harder when what I think stops being something I have and becomes who I am. If my idea is my identity, attacking the idea feels like attacking me. If I can see my ideas as provisional constructions, I can let some of them die without dying alongside them. That is one of the most important expressions of lucidity.

The Problem Is Old; the Tools Are New

It would be comforting to blame social media, but tribalism, dogmatism, propaganda, persecution of outsiders, and the fusion of belief with identity did not begin with the “like” button. We were doing all of this when the greatest technological innovation in conversation was a campfire. What changed was the infrastructure, the scale, and the speed.

The internet connected us. Social media turned millions of people who had mainly received information into people who could also publish it. That democratized communication and, since democracy tends to be inclusive, also democratized prejudice, misinformation, resentment, and tribalism. Everyone got a pulpit. Some had extraordinary things to say; others simply got a pulpit.

Artificial intelligence now adds another layer: it expands our individual capacity to develop ideas. Someone can use it to organize thoughts, challenge hypotheses, find contradictions, look for evidence, and discover perspectives they had never considered. But they can also bring along their favorite prejudice, ask for confirmation, reject whatever makes them uncomfortable, and turn a bad idea they could barely explain into polished prose. The same tool can help challenge a representation or shield it with ever stronger arguments. Prejudice has acquired good grammar, and perhaps a bibliography.

The old problem, then, has acquired new tools. Technology has expanded our capacity to communicate, develop arguments, and persuade; it has not necessarily expanded our lucidity. Perhaps we are in a period of imbalance between our communicative power and our maturity in using it: we are handing ever more powerful megaphones to a species still learning not to shout.

This need not last forever. Human systems also respond to the imbalances they produce, and new cultural norms, forms of education, technologies, and ways of interacting can emerge precisely because we recognize the problems created by earlier ones. There is simply no reason to assume technology will do that for us automatically.

A Question for Us

Perhaps the most important question is not “Which side are you on?” but:

— What would have to happen for you to acknowledge that you are wrong?

The question is not for our opponents. It is for us. One piece of evidence? Ten? The opinion of someone we trust? A personal experience? A contradiction we cannot resolve? The decisive point is whether anything could change our conclusion. If nothing could, we are no longer investigating reality: we are protecting an identity.

A lucid person still has beliefs, preferences, attachments, a history, limitations, and biases; they have not transcended their humanity. The difference lies in trying to notice those forces operating within themselves, incorporating perspectives that did not arise from their own experience, looking at the present through history, seeing another person not merely as an opponent but as another consciousness carrying a partial representation of the same reality, and remaining capable of revising themselves.

That is why 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” leaves little room for lucidity as defined here. Not because it leads to the wrong political side, but because its structure amounts to an association, an identity, a conclusion, and a closed door.

Perhaps the greatest problem with 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 and start competing over which consciousness will impose its interpretation of reality on the other.