HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND: PART 1

The other day I was lamenting the lack of proper debate, having watched a good one in It Wasn't About Banana Milkshake. In that debate, the audience swung 34% in favour of one side of the house, with hundreds of undecideds making up their mind, having heard all of the arguments.

But it wasn't just the undecideds who carried the motion. A large proportion of one side actually changed their minds during the course of the evening. That means they started with one opinion, and ended with the exact opposite.

Admittedly, this was in the era before social media was quite so toxic, but even so, I found myself asking: Does that really happen any more? Are people allowed to change their minds?

Let's take Twitter for example. There have been a cluster of people now, celebrities, who tweeted some vile things when they were younger. Before they shot to fame, their relative anonymity, youth and naivety in a sea of noise protected them from enormous repercussions. So they went on from that drunken moment of hatred, forgot all about it, and subsequently shot to fame.

Then, years later, snoopers with clever alogorithms went digging and they found those old tweets - even the deleted ones somehow - and they shamed those celebrities into apologies and career-crashes.

I'm not saying they should be let off the hook! We all have things in our history we might need to atone for. But should people really be vilified for views they once held but genuinely no longer do? Is there grace to be able to change your mind? Is there forgiveness? 

Secondly, let's think about the current societal situation. We're (rightly) being asked to grow, learn, change, mature, be educated about the impact of white privilege. And I think some of us are finding it excruciatingly difficult - which is a good thing - it should be a painful metamorphosis; a refining by fire that results in a better world, after all.

But it will only result in a better world if we're able to transform, renew, and change our minds. And what I'm saying is that these days, society hasn't exactly encouraged us to do that. Instead it's pushed us into trenches and then labelled us indelibly with the banner that flies above each one.

    

So, how do we change our minds? In Part 2, I'd like to go a bit deeper into this idea of labels, behaviours, and lifestyles. The truth is you don't have to be entrenched, you don't actually have to stick to what you wrote so passionately on flumpbook three weeks ago, and even if you're called a hypocrite in the process, you can grow, you can adapt, and you really can change your mind.