This is a great thread from Helen, and I hope that her essays project comes to fruition.

When I suggest to my fellow leftwing travelers that they read Sowell, or Steele, they think I’m trying to “convert” them. This saddens me.

1. Social & political ideas are not religion.

1/x https://twitter.com/HPluckrose/status/1329389838055960579

2. Ideas that are ideologically different from your own will not “contaminate” you.

This language of “conversion” and “contamination” is *so* unhealthy and speaks to a kind of “fragility of mind.”

What’s the worst thing if you’re on the Left and read Sowell? Or you’re on -

2/x

- the Right and read Baldwin, or Lorde?

You might change your mind!

And why is that so terrifying? You’re still *you* - your identity has not been compromised because you’ve changed a stance or two. But your ideas will be more fleshed out, and your beliefs more confident.

3/x

Most importantly, the “other side” will no longer be some terrifying Bogeyman cobbled together from secondhand whispers and thirdhand falsehoods. You will have read and grappled with their words - Locke, Marx, whomever - yourself, and realized they are just people, like you.

4/x

And perhaps that’s why more folks don’t “cross the aisle” and explore many views outside their own. It is more comfortable to believe you have it “figured out,” easier to write the other side off as simply evil.

Perhaps if we truly had to build murals of our “opponents” -

5/x

- out of steel and not straw, we’d risk compromising our own sense of Self.

We’d have to reevaluate everything we believe to be True. We’d have to re-examine, piece by piece, the narratives we’d constructed around ourselves that assured us that “We” were Righteous and Good.

6/x

But it doesn’t have to be scary.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy taught me that We are not our ideas. We can pick them up, and put them down. Hold them tightly or release them, like grains of sand.

Explore the Other Side. You will still be You.

You may even be better for it.

7/7