Questioning the Voice of Oppression

Yesterday I made the case that pushing people to stop taking actions that reinforce patriarchy (rather than condemn individuals for being patriarchal) is a key element when it comes to transforming our society through bottom-up activism.  But that begs a significant question: how do you get someone to stop taking patriarchal actions?To answer that question, I draw on my years of experience as an educator.

Inside Out

There are two general categories of motivation that drive all human behavior: extrinsic motivation (things that come from outside of you) and intrinsic motivation (things that come from inside of you.  In the educational context, grades, treats, rewards, etc. are all extrinsic motivators, while the desire to learn/understand is an intrinsic motivator.  So if your goal is to change someone's behavior, you have one of two choices - you can either change the set of consequences (i.e. extrinsic motivators) they experience for their choices, or you can try to get them to see the world differently and therefore feel differently about their decisions, thereby shifting their intrinsic motivations.

Since we're discussing ways to transform large scale power structures, that pretty much rules out changing the extrinsic motivators, at least in the short term.  Changing consequences for acting like a patriarchal jerk, at least on a large scale, requires authority and influence.  Passing laws, shifting broad social perceptions, and other steps like these that significantly shift peoples' extrinsic motivations might result in quick change, but if people that wanted to militate against patriarchy were already in positions of power, we probably wouldn't be in the position to discuss how to break it down...

So how do you get people to look at the world in a different way?

The Wisest of Us

It was thinking about the problem in that way that made me realize that getting people to look at the world in a different way is basically my day job.  I am a teacher.  I walk into my classroom and I pull a bunch of tricks out of my bag to get my students to question their conceptions and strive to understand the world more completely, so here's my two cents on how shake people's deeply held beliefs:

1. Start with questions.  Follow the example of Socrates.  If your goal is to change minds rather than score points, you're better off taking people out of a defensive frame of mind, and making them feel as if they're talking to a person that wants to understand them.  It's a fundamental aspect of the human condition.  Everyone wants to be understood.  Plus, this questioning serves a dual purpose - not only does it put the question recipient into a more pliable frame of mind, but it allows you to guide them to a point where they can test to what extent their beliefs about the world (or women and men and the ideal structure of society) are founded in factual observations.
2. Dig Deeper.  Don't ask just one question.  Peel back layer after layer.  Sexism, like most prejudices, is usually deeply engrained, and its ultimate origins are likely buried beneath accumulated layers of anger, frustration, and selective information absorption that tends to confirm one's own prejudices.
3. Be empathetic. The project of social transformation ultimately aims to include all members of the human community in a more loving, inclusive, supportive social arrangement, and that's not possible if the deviants that call the shots right now are all sentenced to excommunication.  Plus, I believe that all human actions, even the most horrible and condemnable, grow from real emotional experiences with which we can all empathize to some extent.  Connecting on that empathetic level is the key to getting someone to put down their weapons.
4. Don't bite off more than you can chew.  As mentioned above, prejudices dwell deep.  You probably won't convince some sexist jerk that he's been treating women like shit all his life and that might not be a good thing after a single conversation.  But you might tweak something just a tad that sheds a new light on an experience he has in the future.  And if he has a few conversations and experiences like that, then maybe he just will realize the error of his ways.

I'm advocating for a movement towards universal empathy that lacks the vicious satisfaction of the hyper-masculine revenge fantasy.  It isn't sexy in the conventional sense.  But we've been fixing the world in sexy ways for millennia, and look how messed up everything is now!  Pretty much every genuinely positive choice I've ever made (eating healthy, exercising, apologizing) has come with a period of painful adjustment where I've had to force myself to forego short-term gratification in the pursuit of a comprehensively better life.  Giving up on the idea of getting even and embracing the idea of getting better strikes me as the big-picture equivalent when it comes to activism for a better world.