I was thinking the other day that those with true confidence in their beliefs tend not to proselytize — and when they do so, they use the soft-sell — which is amazingly more effective in the long run than using high-pressure techniques. When what you’re selling is a belief, your job is to persuade, not to cajole or threaten. Maneuver X is the most critical part of changing people’s minds. Fanatics are incapable of executing the maneuver.
So I serendipitously ran across this quote in my readings today:
You are never dedicated to something that you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
Good thought. The quote is by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It calls to mind a great many different kinds of fanatics in today’s world — the religious and political fanatics blowing themselves up in Iraq as if that is going to change anything; the fanatics who flew planes into our buildings; religious fanatics seeking to shove their beliefs and the implications of those beliefs down the throats of others; even the idiots at NARAL who thought that smearing John Roberts was going to somehow benefit their cause — a mistaken belief pointed out to them by a friend they desparately need to keep.
