The Burning Need to Force Your Views on Others
Why do we freak out just because other people think differently?
I have been writing about it for a while now: one of the signature human pathologies is the urge to force collective solutions on everyone.
We are a highly social species, and thus we have developed, as a part of our basic psychological wiring, the notion that “finding ways to live together” must mean forcing everyone in a certain area to live in a certain way. This is a subject to which we will return, but for now, I want to posit a simple partial explanation for why we do this.
First, let us look at a basic human trait. You’ve seen it plenty, and just about all of us have done it at some point:
Being completely flabbergasted at another person’s differing views on something.
How could he think that way? What an idiot. Her views are truly evil. And so on.
This feeling is the fuel for battles both personal and political, and I have a thought as to one of the basic reasons why it occurs…
In order to function in the world, we need to ‘download’ informational and ideological packages. We cannot figure everything out for ourselves—any one individual’s lifetime is simply too short. We cannot learn all there is to know about science and medicine. We cannot plumb every possible permutation of every moral question. We cannot try out every possible system to see what works.
Instead, we must rely on the accumulated knowledge and experience of others, both living and dead.
It is a signature feature of our species: We transmit information down through the generations, and those generations are able to build on previous information. This is called the “ratchet effect” in human knowledge. The ratchet clicks forward a notch, and we don’t have to go back to the start in each generation.
This is not the case for other species. Even highly intelligent species essentially re-teach the same single informational package in each generation. If there is any sort of advancement, it is glacially slow. Chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, are still living basically as they did six million years ago.
This is certainly an advantage for humankind. But it may have a dark side…
As I said above, we must take on information in packages—sets of data or ideas, many of which have been worked out by others. Atoms and molecules exist. The planets of the solar system revolve around our local star. These moral ideas produce better results. We need these ideological and informational packages in order to function in, and make sense of, the world.
So what happens when we find out that someone makes sense of the world in a completely different way? What does that say about our own sense-making?
How can anything make sense if two people are coming to two completely different conclusions about the same set of facts?
This is a working theory, the bulk of which only occurred to me recently. But I believe it is at least a partial explanation for the human obsession with what other people think. It is disruptive and challenging to our sense-making to find out that someone else is making sense of the same world in a completely different way.
So we download these packages—to make sense, to take on larger data sets, etc. And then we form “teams” based on those downloads.
Team Red. Team Blue.
Religion A. Religion B. Team No-Religion-for-Me.
Some pose less of a challenge than others. Team The-Earth-Is-Flat, for example, doesn’t really make me question my own beliefs to the contrary.
In an ideal world, no one else’s beliefs ought to be a bother. Interestingly, fellow substacker Philip Mollica believes that in the future, they won’t be. I hope he’s right. There’s really no reason to get so bent out of shape just because someone sees the world differently.
Except…….
The way our governments are set up, how other people see the world does impact us. “Democracy”—that is, any system that uses voting, whether direct or indirect—gives people the power to gather together in groups and force their views on other people. Those other people, in turn, must gather together to defend themselves. The system thus forces us to care what other people think.
I don’t want to care what anyone thinks and does, so long as it does not initiate force. But the system makes it hard to completely let that go.
Subscriber and fellow Substacker Jace Berger (
) described peace as “the ability for diverse groups to rest next to each other without the need to agree.” I believe he is correct. Putting an end to the outrage we feel when others disagree would unlock some next-level improvements in our species.But the system, as always, stands in our way.
Over at Underthrow,
discusses the notion that there is an upward “spiral” trajectory to our development—levels of sophistication through which we, as individuals and a species, travel as we advance…hopefully retaining the best of each previous level as we move on. I think this notion is apropos here.The ways we have found to “get along” may have made sense, or been the most logical outcome, at each stage of our development. But now it is time to move to the next level. Cramming everyone into a one-size-fits-all polity and then claiming that they like it because they get to vote…well, that is so last-level. We need to spiral up.
Note: I gave Dall-E the following prompt: “One person is horrified to learn that another person thinks differently about an issue.” The image below is what it gave me. AI is so weird!
Great piece! I love what you say about sense-making, that encountering someone with a different view from your own can be destabilizing.
I’ve thought a lot about what that feeling really is: fear.
Fear of the unknown. A fear of death.
The “other” induces a vulnerability in us and brings with it a sense of danger. A threat to ego. Arguing to convince someone you’re right and they’re wrong is driven by a deeply held need for safety, to find solid ground inside a chaotic world.
Just that feeling of blissful relief that comes from finding connection inside a one on one conversation- when at first, you’re arguing a point and not finding common ground, shouting past each other, until someone says something that lands with the other and they say “Ahhh...I understand now. I get you!”
Why is that so relieving? That connection is real, and powerful enough to have us feel a little more secure and a little less alone in this wild world. It’s my belief we need to learn to provide that safety for ourselves or else we will continue to force others to provide it for us.
The need for connection will never go away....but we can learn to not force it upon others by becoming fearless and trusting in ourselves.
Different is good. Stupid is where the problem is. Then the ones with a PhD that are not brilliant. But, think they are. Cognitive dissonance is a wicked disease. Damn few people get original thoughts. Fewer still put them into action. Bell curve and www.orsja.org.