John Cleese vs Extremism

What people said

godelski · 2020-12 · Strong recommendation

These are some really good points. It is reminding me a lot of one of my favorite John Cleese videos[0]. One of the things that I think makes this so difficult is that language has a lot of limits that people don't realize. Since we often don't run into issues with communication (or rather don't notice since the errors are small) it is difficult to realize when we're in boundary cases. For example there's priming[1]. Many may learn that this is a useful way to influence people and many are aware of the psychological experiments, but it is also a fundamental part of how we communicate. We try to communicate the most information with the least amount of words. But this same factor is why good faith arguments are so important but also difficult to maintain. We could not easily converse if we didn't make certain assumptions about another person's views. This is normally fine but we run into problems in heated topics where we often act like someone can only hold an extreme opinion (and of course, mine is not extreme and just common sense). It's the "oh, I've heard this argument before" and while one person may have subtext another may not (why it is difficult to identify dog whistling). Removing nuance from a topic makes it easy, and we like easy things. But that's not beneficial to resolving issues and like you say "leads to a wilderness of mirrors". But it is impossible to tell if priming like this is actively being pushed or naturally happening, since we do have a natural predi

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nkurz · 2020-07 · Strong recommendation

Cleese's 1987 monologue on "extremism" is delightful and well worth the two minutes it takes to watch: What we never hear about extremism is its advantages. Well the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies. Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive isn't it? So if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway, and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons, and that if it wasn't for them you'd actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time. [VIDEO]

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A_non_e-moose · 2021-04 · Recommendation

See John Cleese on Extremism [VIDEO] The "you're either with us or against us" mentality leads to the eradication of moderates and further extremism. A healthy society needs balance. How can we counteract this?

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