Changing One's Mind

When the famous economist, John Maynard Keynes, was accused of changing his views, he famously retorted:

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

We like to believe we are like Keynes, open to new facts and willing to change our mind. If only the other side were like us, we lament…

However, Seth Godin is right about the sad truth about political discussions:

“The honest answer to, “if it could be demonstrated that there’s a more effective or just solution to this problem, would you change your mind?” is, for a political question, “no.”

Kathryn Schulz takes Godin’s point a step further in her superb book, Being Wrong. She says, we almost never change our minds easily. She cites this spectacular example as evidence: guess when Switzerland gave all women the right to vote? Hold your breath: in 1971. Did you find that “stunningly retrograde”, to use Schulz’s phrase? By that time, Switzerland was in the dubious company of countries like “Bangladesh, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Samoa, and Iraq”. So what was going on?

It was rooted in the Swiss structure whereby the country is divided into cantons:

“The cantons decide who can vote in local and cantonal elections, while the federal government decides who can vote on national initiatives and referendums.”

This structure led to weird situations like when Lise Girardin became the female mayor of Geneva in 1968 but still couldn’t vote in national elections! Finally, in 1971, a national referendum forced the issue by giving women the right to vote. At the national level. 2 cantons held firm and still refused to give women the right to vote in cantonal elections. One of them finally caved in in 1989 while the other one never did (Btw, the last one was forced by the Supreme Court in 1990).

How could those 2 cantons buck the global trend for so long? Surprisingly, says Schulz, they remained unmoved “precisely because the pressure came from outside”. A Swiss author described those cantons’ view that this was “unwanted reform” that “was being forced upon them by the national government, politicians, the press, and foreign influences”.

Did that last part sound familiar? As Schulz explains:

“Far from making us reevaluate our beliefs, external opposition- especially opposition that we perceive as threatening or insulting- tends to make us dig our heels in even more.”

So does all this mean that any major change in worldviews can only come from within a community? For some topics, that may be acceptable but for others, like terrorism, one can’t wait, can we?