Over the past few years, I have spent time reading, watching and listening to media that I normally don’t follow. My family thinks I am a little crazy to do this. The truth is that I find it extremely challenging to engage in this activity, but I view it the way I view exercise - difficult but necessary.
I liken the time spent in places like Brietbart, Fox News, Daily Caller and the Daily Stormer as being at a gym for my brain. Some days, my brain gets pummelled. Yet, when I think carefully about the exercise I am engaging in, I start to realize that it’s a bit like an inoculation. I am getting a taste of some truly incredible poison but it feels like my brain starts to develop antibodies. Please note that I am not comparing Fox News to the Daily Stormer. I am however suggesting that if you only keep to one silo, you run the risk of getting into trouble.
Do I recommend you do this? Well, if you’re serious about being a bridge to the silos, it’s vital you examine your own cognitive biases. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the sign of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Over the past several months, I have thought about what moves people away from a silo to the formation of a bridge of understanding or insight. What pierces someone’s mind? What brings about a reversal of thought? Greater minds than mine have examined these questions for millennia. But I’d like to suggest that sometimes it’s not what you think. Sometimes we start to change our minds because of something small, but significant.
I was listening to a podcast called The Shrink Next Door. This is a fascinating story about a patient named Marty Markowitz who fell under the spell of his psychiatrist named Isaac Herschkopf. It’s a truly incredible tale that seems more like fiction than fact. But what struck me was how the spell of the psychiatrist was finally broken. It turned out that the psychiatrist did one thing that was a dealbreaker for the patient. After years of truly bizarre practices and questionable charity accounting (aka embezzlement), the straw that broke the camel’s back was the psychiatrist not visiting Marty in hospital as he recovered from an operation.
The decades of cajoling from other family members didn’t change Marty’s mind. Unfortunately, in most cases it led to even further acrimony and estrangement. But the simple act of neglect spoke volumes to Marty and he eventually left and got control back of his life. Sometimes, simple acts or in the case of Marty, a non-action can be the catalyst for change.
I have been watching this 4th wave delta variant dominate the news for the past few weeks. There are upwards of 90 million Americans who aren’t persuaded to change their minds and take the vaccine. The deaths of over 600,000 of their fellow citizens have not persuaded them. The needle has literally NOT moved by watching nurses and doctors in hospitals get overwhelmed.
So if the media isn’t going to move 90 + million Americans to get vaccinated what will? I think jealousy combined by rivalry will eventually get people off their butts and into vaccination clinics.
I know, that sounds crazy, but hear me out. What is the one key thing that many people missed dearly in the last 16 months? Human contact - real human contact. But it wasn’t a level playing field. Some states did very little in the way of lockdowns. Their populations weren’t deprived of human contact. They were much more “free” and many people in the more restrictive states felt jealous. But many felt the lockdowns were necessary to prevent deaths and destruction of their hospitals.
Here in Ontario we have over 80% of our population vaccinated at least once. We are working on getting to 80% vaccinated twice. After over a year of lockdowns, now that we’re able to experience life without the virus looming over our heads, it’s a great feeling. As I mentioned, some places that never did a full lockdown and were ambivalent about masks and social distancing found themselves doing pretty good with the virus - initially. For example people in Texas didn’t experience the death count that New York had to deal with. Fast forward a few months, and Texas has more deaths from the virus than New York.
So now, slowly but surely, people in under vaccinated places start to realize the virus doesn’t watch Fox News or CNN or visit Breitbart. They had freedom when other states didn’t. They basked in it and sometimes gloated. Now, the tables have turned. In time, more Americans will become vaccinated because as much as they hate to admit it, their fellow countrymen are enjoying more freedom than they are.