Influencing Angelina: How to get her to join your religion/philosophy/political party.

Have you ever wanted to convince me to change my views on things but couldn't figure out how to do it even though I seem to be an easy target open minded enough to hear you out (which should naturally lead to agreeing with your flawless reasoning)?

I seem to continually find myself on the receiving end of evangelical fervor and the target of everyone who wants to convert people to some wild way of thinking, believing, or living.  Friends have commented on it saying "Well no one does that to me...you must be inviting it."  which confounds me because I have always developed strong opinions about things and haven't meant to give any invitation to people to convince me that aliens are going to take over the planet, that Jesus is very sad that I haven't "found" him, and that the purpose of all government is to invade my life and control my mind.  Either my strong opinions are an open challenge to every fervent member of fringe groups/beliefs OR I exude the smell of someone easily influenced.

I am not, and never have been, an easy person to influence.

I have gotten in an unpleasant disagreement with a good friend over food philosophy.  His philosophy (based on his hard research and knowledge of the body through studying biology in school) is based on the Paleo diet, which is very similar to the Atkins diet.  My food philosophy is one that has no real name or gimmick- lots of variety of all the food groups (except obviously I don't eat meat). 

This friend feels that I immediately blew his views off even though he was sharing them with me because he cares about me and wants to help.

I didn't think I'd asked for help- but then I remembered that I did ask for "help" in all my comments about my weight- wondering why the hell I can't seem to lose it.  To be honest, I wasn't asking for a whole new diet that challenges absolutely everything I believe and have read about food and nutrition.  But I'm not going to go into that yet.

I did blow his views off pretty quickly and there are a few reasons for it.  First of all, he's not the first person I have known who has done a mostly protein based low carb diet.  His information, whether correct or not, is not actually completely new to me.  I have listened to people raving about no/low carb diets for years.  I decided for myself (many friends-on-Atkins-ago) that this diet is not healthy for people in the long term.  (Never mind that none of them have so far been able to stick to it for the long term, we can come back to that later if it seems important.)

There is another more compelling reason that I failed to be excited by his earth-shattering new scientific "proof" that the Paleo diet is the healthiest one on the planet and I want to share this with not just my friend but with any of you who have ever wanted me to listen to you and agree with your views.

The first thing you must all remember is that I was raised around a lot of really excitable people who believed a great many things that were "proven" by one scientist or another or that were proven by their own example.  Many of the people I grew up around were mentally unstable.  Some of them were unstable because they were mentally ill, some because of drugs, and some because they were mentally ill and then took drugs.  Nearly all the people I grew up close to were revolutionaries of some kind or another.  I have learned to distrust a certain collection of catch phrases, adjectives, and expressions which nearly always signal that a person is spouting unreliable information or is going to try and convince me of something completely ridiculous.

If you would like to discuss ideas with me and you want me to really listen to you, don't use these words, expressions, or catch phrases:

government repression of facts!
fountain of youth (or it's more flamboyant cousin: eternal youth)
Jesus
our heavenly father
government conspiracy
aliens (coupled with any suggestion of invasion)
apocalyptic
euphoric
life changing!
revolutionary
scientifically proven (but repressed) information
panacea
garden of eden
god's intentions
what the government doesn't want you to know
cover-up
what the press doesn't want you to know
you'll never be sick again!
testimonials
anything proven by one or two scientists but denied by all others
sin
utopia
what the advertisers don't want you to know
secret to....(whatever people always want the secret to)
creationism
any claim that the entire world is wrong about something
the thirteen families...????*
cure!
mind control...
any conspiracy
what the (any group/company/name here) doesn't want you to know
everyone who converts is tranformed!
total transformation
mind altering
prayer
heaven
saved
practically sells itself
anything that makes huge promises


There's something else you should know: I'm allergic to sales pitches.  Sometimes people get so genuinely excited about something that they can't help but tell everyone they know about it.  But what if I don't show interest?  It becomes a sales pitch when you don't back off.  When you decide that you just haven't said the right combination of "facts" or given me the right angle that will convince me that you are right and I need to listen to you and change my beliefs, or whatever you're trying to influence me to do or be.

My mother is highly susceptible to sales pitches for religious beliefs (new age, mostly) and new lifestyles (communes were once all the rage) and new diets (coffee enemas were proven to increase health and vitality...didn't you know?).  My mother has become sick from fasting, lost all her money to schemes (that couldn't fail to make her rich quick), and has lost her way with every kind of spiritual guidance you can imagine. 

As a consequence I don't trust people in general and in particular anyone trying to tell me that everything I know to be true is wrong. 

I rely heavily on doing my own research, reading, talking to others, and in the end, always trusting my gut and my own personal experience.  So anyone who comes along and says "all the information you've ever read about nutrition was just a scientific mistake which was adopted by the government while the truth was repressed..." I stop listening.  You have just talked like a crazy person and I may not be a researcher, or an intellectual, or a scientist...but I am intelligent and I have the cognitive skills to use my intelligence well to sort through information and to put it in both the proper context and into perspective.

Anyone who suggests that I can't trust myself to find the truth is someone who is condescending and dismissive of me and I won't listen to what they say even if some of what they say has merit.

So that's my advice to any of you who have difficulty telling when to  believe someone or not:

Never believe a person who suggests in any way that you can't trust yourself to know or find the truth.

I spend a lot of time and energy investigating my own and other people's philosophies about nearly everything I think is important.  I read a lot of books, I talk to a great many people, and in spite of perhaps appearing to be somewhat inexperienced and naive, I have lived a life that has given ample opportunity for lessons in trust, violence, food, death, life, sex, deviance, health, and taxes.  I don't write down all the sources for my knowledge (such as where I read what bit of information I just mentioned in conversation) because I find that tedious.  I'm not a researcher or a scientist and as a writer I'm not even a journalist in need of citing sources.  I collect information and am constantly reassessing what I already know or think and deciding if new information displaces old thought or whether it simply confirms that my thinking is still sound.

I have an open mind in some ways: I accept that a lot of people and I will disagree with each other and that there is room for more than one way of living, believing, and thinking healthily. 

However, I will obviously always think my way is better than yours if we don't agree and you'd be lying if you said you didn't think yours was better than mine.

I am not an easy person to influence.  I am not looking for a new lifestyle, a new religion, or revolutionary science.  So if you're going to convince me to change everything I believe is true you're going to have to work damn hard to do it and you aren't likely to succeed.


In the next post I will discuss specifically, for the benefit of not just my carb hating friend- but for anyone else who's been wanting to get me excited about a Paleo diet, why I will not be adopting a carb-free lifestyle.  I will attempt to write it in such a way that you people out there who are happy with your carb-free food philosophy will not feel attacked by my own different (more conventional) food tradition but will also understand that I haven't simply dismissed your diet without a thought.  I hope to convince you that I am not a candidate for conversion to a carb-free life while leaving room for us to still be friends and be able to sit at a table and share the food we both can agree on. 





*This was a particularly great bit of crazy my mom brought to me at a time when I was already on the verge of a breakdown and she had "proof" in writing from "scientists" that the entire world's money was controlled by just thirteen families and those families were going to join up with some alien race to rule the world or destroy it or something marvelous.