Persuasion

“You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.” ― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

I guess it’s because I viewed clips from the recent World Baseball Classic that scenes from the The Natural and Field of Dreams started turning up on my YouTube feed. I have a soft spot for Field of Dreams because it takes place in Iowa, where I once lived, and I watched a few scenes. The tussle between Ray and his brother-in-law Mark, shown in the video below, sparked a train of thought which is the basis of this post. What struck me was Mark’s vehemence as he attempted to persuade Ray to sell his land. Why, I wondered, was he so insistent, almost violent about the matter? Was it only his deep love for his sister and her family and his determination to prevent their financial ruin, or were there other motives? As far as I know (I didn’t re-watch all of it), the movie doesn’t explore his motivations further because they don’t figure into the plot. He and his sister are redheads and both are shown to have hot tempers, and that’s probably all we’re supposed to make of it. Still, I wondered, why so much passion?

Various questions popped up in my mind. Was he just trying to help them or did he feel a twinge of guilt that translated to anger because he wanted to get control of that piece of land? Was he fearful that Ray’s bankruptcy would make his sister’s family financially dependent on him for years to come? Was Mark an older brother used to bossing his younger sibling around, or was he a younger brother, formerly dominated by his sister, savoring a chance to turn the tables? Was he resentful of Ray for stealing his sister’s affections from him and pleased to have an opportunity to play the hero and reclaim them? Maybe the conversion of good farmland into a ball field outraged his banker sensibilities, and what they were doing felt like a personal insult that undermined his worldview. Whatever the cause, there was something more to his anger than wanting to help his family. Maybe he was just frustrated that all his good, logical arguments had no effect and was reduced to wanting to knock some sense into them.

To be fair, Mark had the rational point of view. In the real world, we would side with him and not with the magical thinking of his sister’s family. In fact, if a beloved family member displayed a similarly irrational point of view and gravitated towards the kind of magical thinking we might call maga-cal thinking which we couldn’t talk them out of, we might be tempted to try to knock some sense into him as well, persuasion proving futile. However, we don’t go to Hollywood for rationality but for magic, and we’re solidly lined up with Ray and his family against Mark’s petty and pedestrian concerns. In fact, the near tragedy resulting from Ray’s daughters topple from the stands wakes Mark up to a dimension previously invisible to him. He sees the ballplayers for the first time and becomes a convert. The normal world is effectively turned upside down through magical thinking—as it is, though less happily, through maga-cal thinking.

Shortly after viewing the Field of Dreams scene, I watched the YouTube clip below, which intrigued me because it’s so unusual for someone to change one’s mind and admit to being wrong, especially about political matters. For a long time I’ve been trying to make sense of maga-cal thinking, rejecting the glib idea that people caught up in it are evil or stupid. The simplest and most reasonable explanation I can come up with is that it really is a kind of magical thinking. In these complicated times, we’re confronted with difficult problems, and the desire to make them all disappear is strong. The temptation to go along with someone who calls climate change a hoax and claims that he can fix everything that’s wrong and make things like they used to be when America ruled the world, when there were only two genders, and when the reins of government and industry were firmly in the hands of white Protestant men, is too great for many to resist.

As it turns out, the woman who changed her mind is the exception and three other interviewees remained securely fixed in their maga-cal thinking ways, ready to undergo financial hardship to continue their support of someone who has proved over and over again in every possible way that he absolutely doesn’t deserve it. They unreservedly support a war which they say is necessary to make America strong and to avoid a nuclear war, while it is actually doing the exact opposite. Once one is locked into magical thinking, it’s not easy to get free of it. Even the woman who changed her mind apparently wasn’t convinced by the multitude of despicable things her one-time hero has said and done, but by rising gas prices. Most of the consequences of maga policies have not not been directly felt by most Americans, and that seems to help them keep the dream. The limits of the persuasiveness of words are wonderfully articulated in a poem by E. E. Cummings:

plato told

him:he couldn’t
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn’t believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn’t believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

Notes for this poem always explain that scrap metal from the decommissioned and dismantled 6th Ave. El[evated train line] was sold to Japan a few years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. No words of persuasion could convince the unnamed character in the poem of something, maybe the horrors of war or the fragility of life, which only became real to him — a little too late — after being struck on the head with shrapnel. Let’s hope that higher gas prices will be enough to wake people from their maga dream and it won’t be necessary for them first to get struck by a “bit of the old sixth avenue el”.