To know what I am talking about, let me give you an example. I have this friend who went crazy over the vaccine issue. She’s done so much research into it that I feel like I can’t talk to her about her vaccine skepticism. Whenever I start to talk about something, she would drown me with a ton of articles and youtube videos and most of the times from the actual websites of UN health and stuff. It would have taken me a day to just go through that stuff. So I gave up on convincing her about vaccines. Might seem cruel but even I lost my certainty about vaccines after I met her. There’s just too much to know and I don’t completely trust the institutions either, but I do trust the institutions enough to vaccinate myself and my kids but not enough to you know, hold a debate about it with someone who has spent days researching this stuff.
You can take any topic which is divisive, which basically looms over the media all day and you can find a ton of articles to either support it or “debunk” it. I think 9/11 wasn’t caused by Bush, I am almost certain, but I won’t bet my house on it. I mean, this is almost a certainty, but yeah.
On other issues which are not this much of a certainty I fail to see how to convince a person who thinks something that they are wrong.
Stuff like earth is round or not, I can prove. But was the virus from Chinese market or from a lab, I can’t.
Have aliens visited earth? I don’t know. It would be wicked if we make first contact, but as awesome as this is, I am not motivated to search about this on the internet. I don’t think I would search anything about the not so cool topics of life. I don’t know enough to hold an informed debate about capitalism vs socialism or any other hot button issue for that moment.
What do you do in these situations?
I can sense that this is poorly written, but I hope you get the gist of what I am trying to say.
On top of a lot of other comments, try to pull them back from the extreme side of thinking. It doesn’t need to be “I don’t like this system, so nothing can ever be trusted at all no matter what”
Like yeah, I don’t like out Healthcare system. I don’t like big pharma. There are people dying because they can’t afford insulin, so they have to horde as much as possible to stretch it out. How am I supposed to trust them when this is the type of people they are?
On the other hand, what is the other person’s plan when they break an arm? Have a heart attack? A stroke? The doctors are lawyers, so clearly that’s not cancer. They just want you to have chemo so you get sick and then need them more. That’s how it works, right? Anything less means you love big pharma.
Or, maybe there is a sort of middle ground where we are able to sit back and look at the amount of lives modern medicine has saved. And that’s why we go to the hospital when we need to.
It doesn’t make much sense to accept everything else in the medical industry while denying this one because we can shake out fists while vaguely screaming “Big pharma!”