Declining to Perform the Agonies of a Changed Mind

Whenever someone convinces me of something, they invariably keep pushing - keep arguing their point - long after I've declared agreement. It's the darndest thing. And I just figured out what's going on.

We're supposed to change our minds ponderously. Painfully. Slowly. With weight and sighs and emotions. A change of mind is such a rare event in human society that we expect it to involve heft and solemnity. We watch for a process akin to mourning, where a person struggles to let go of an old assumption and be reborn into some unimaginable new identity.

So we expect to see the signs of titanic inner struggle. Without that evidence, how would we know there was an actual change?

Answer: because I just told you! I told you I was convinced! You chose not to believe me because I failed to undergo the expected agonies. My face didn't contort, my eyes didn't dim and refocus, there was no gasping or groaning. I just accepted the change! I reframe and get on with it. And this seeming witchcraft is freely available to you, as well. The kabuki rituals which signal reframing are empty drama!

If you simply change your mind, your veracity will be doubted. You appear to be lying; merely pretending to have accepted a change. Or patronizing. Anything but simply changing your perspective. Because reframing is presumed to be rare and difficult - though it's literally the easiest thing a human being can do.


In one of my most-ignored postings (which is saying something!), I noted that it's phenomenally easy to teach a young child to arbitrarily adore red lights, arguing that there are gargantuan implications for our latent reframing faculty.