Sometimes when discussing a controversial issue, people are kind of avoiding the most important points within it, and then it feels relevant to ask them what their interest in discussing it is. Their true interest will often be to control the political discourse away from some dynamic they perceive as pathological, but if they explained that, they would have to argue that the dynamic is pathological, which they often don’t want to do because they risk triggering the dynamic that way. As a diversion, they will sometimes say that their motivation is to seek truth.
I think you see this a lot with racism/sexism-type stuff, where racists/sexists dissociate from the fact that they are racist/sexist in order to square their sense that their perspective ought to be considered with the common norm against sexism/racism. And then they consider enforcement of said norm to be pathological, but they’re too dissociated/afraid to explain how, so they say they just care about the truth, even though their dissociation often prevents them from properly investigating said truth.
I think its worth thinking about what you are trying to achieve in any given discussion. Why do you need the person to acknowledge what you believe is their true interest? I do think people often describe there interests as being about finding or demonstrating “the truth” for a lot of topics, but to me there is a large possibility that going down that road mostly gets into semantics.
I’m not entirely sure I understand your point regarding racism/sexism, but I can imagine something like this. Someone has a belief that is considered racist. When confronted about why they talk about this belief so much, they say its because they think its true and its super important to stand up for the truth. My view is, often the person probably does genuinely believe the thing is true, but their degree of focus does come partially from what you say, the desire to have their belief not considered racist. Which one is the “real” reason? I think its kind of hopelessly entangled. They do believe the thing is true but its not like they are going around being really concerned about telling people the sky is blue, even though they also believe that is true. Often times if you are in a discussion related to this you can focus on whether the belief in question is or is not true, whether it is or is not racist, that kind of thing. I think you will often get more productive discussions this way than to go into what the individual person’s “real reasons” are, unless you have an interest in them specifically (like they are your friend and you really want convince them of something about the topic). Even in that case, its not clear you can really “untangle” the reasons, but you might want to go more into their psychology if you care about them specifically.
It’s often not just that they endorse a single belief, but also rather that they have a whole psychodrama and opinions on the appropriate areas of investigation. [Joseph Bronski](https://x.com/BronskiJoseph/status/1917573847810990210) exemplifies this when taken to an extreme.
Sometimes when discussing a controversial issue, people are kind of avoiding the most important points within it, and then it feels relevant to ask them what their interest in discussing it is. Their true interest will often be to control the political discourse away from some dynamic they perceive as pathological, but if they explained that, they would have to argue that the dynamic is pathological, which they often don’t want to do because they risk triggering the dynamic that way. As a diversion, they will sometimes say that their motivation is to seek truth.
I think you see this a lot with racism/sexism-type stuff, where racists/sexists dissociate from the fact that they are racist/sexist in order to square their sense that their perspective ought to be considered with the common norm against sexism/racism. And then they consider enforcement of said norm to be pathological, but they’re too dissociated/afraid to explain how, so they say they just care about the truth, even though their dissociation often prevents them from properly investigating said truth.
I think its worth thinking about what you are trying to achieve in any given discussion. Why do you need the person to acknowledge what you believe is their true interest? I do think people often describe there interests as being about finding or demonstrating “the truth” for a lot of topics, but to me there is a large possibility that going down that road mostly gets into semantics.
I’m not entirely sure I understand your point regarding racism/sexism, but I can imagine something like this. Someone has a belief that is considered racist. When confronted about why they talk about this belief so much, they say its because they think its true and its super important to stand up for the truth. My view is, often the person probably does genuinely believe the thing is true, but their degree of focus does come partially from what you say, the desire to have their belief not considered racist. Which one is the “real” reason? I think its kind of hopelessly entangled. They do believe the thing is true but its not like they are going around being really concerned about telling people the sky is blue, even though they also believe that is true. Often times if you are in a discussion related to this you can focus on whether the belief in question is or is not true, whether it is or is not racist, that kind of thing. I think you will often get more productive discussions this way than to go into what the individual person’s “real reasons” are, unless you have an interest in them specifically (like they are your friend and you really want convince them of something about the topic). Even in that case, its not clear you can really “untangle” the reasons, but you might want to go more into their psychology if you care about them specifically.
It’s often not just that they endorse a single belief, but also rather that they have a whole psychodrama and opinions on the appropriate areas of investigation. [Joseph Bronski](https://x.com/BronskiJoseph/status/1917573847810990210) exemplifies this when taken to an extreme.
And I wouldn’t say that the real answer is to have their belief not be considered racist. I’d say the real reason is something like, they want to fight back against anti-racists. [Arthur Jensen probably described the best what they’re trying to fight against](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/04/a-kind-of-social-paranoia-a-belief-that-mysterious-hostile-forces-are-operating-to-cause-inequalities-in-educational-and-occupational-performance-despite-all-apparent-efforts-to-eliminate-prejudi/).