Seth Godin: A reason persuasion is surprisingly difficult

Seth Godin gives A reason persuasion is surprisingly difficult.

To many people, it feels manipulative or insincere or even morally wrong to momentarily take the other person's point of view when trying to advance an argument that we already believe in.

And that's one reason why so many people claim to not like engaging in marketing. Marketing is the empathetic act of telling a story that works, that's true for the person hearing it, that stands up to scrutiny. But marketing is not about merely sharing what you, the marketer believes. It's about what we, the listener, believe.

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This is sound advice for revolutionaries. We must thoroughly understand the world that a worker inhabits.

The best way is for us to be workers ourselves and engage other workers in political discussions based on our shared experiences.

Although we tend to inflate ourselves with our supposed superior political education, we would be wasting everyone's time if we approached every political discussion as it were an internal party debate.

As Ted Rall points out in Bernie Sanders is a Socialist and So Are You:

As far as I know, Bernie hasn’t emphasized the quality of public education in his campaign. But something is, no pun intended, radically wrong when so few Americans understand basic political and economic terms — especially when they apply to the political and economic system under which they themselves live.

By global standards, Sanders’ campaign is calling for weak socialist tea. In most European countries, all colleges are free or charge nominal fees. Socialized medicine, in which your doctor is a government employee and there’s no such thing as a big for-profit hospital corporation, is the international norm. Paid leave? Obviously. And most governments recognize the importance of public infrastructure, and not relying on the private sector to provide every job.

There can only be one reason Americans don’t know this stuff: they’re idiots. Their schools made them that way as kids. Media propaganda keeps them stupid as adults.

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So, we face a populace that is intentionally crippled in political thinking. Yes, we can decry their political idiocracy. But these people are the foundations that a Socialist revolution must be built upon.

To mis-quote Donald Rumsfeld:

As you known, you go into a revolution with the people as they are, not the people you might want or wish to have at a later time.