How My Mind Changed
How chronic disability, an influential friend, and a glut of audio radically reshaped my politics, values, and ethical commitments—and how I know there is more change to come.
What is the purpose of this essay? That is, how could anyone possibly be interested in why some random 20-something changes their mind on, well, anything? The answer is three-fold.
First, the goal of Open Doors is to be a way to track and network my own ideas—to build contexts. I’m essentially outsourcing my memory to a blog and the various archives found in What I’m Hearing. Identifying what I once believed and how I’ve changed is critical to holding myself accountable for any future content I post. It’s evidence of authenticity. And, in a way, it gives me an out. I’m very likely to write something here that, five years from now, I completely disagree with, and that’s sort of the point.
Second, we—as individuals and society as a whole—have adopted a political, ideological, and ethical rigidity that seems unprecedented. If I ask someone to state their position on, say, gun control, I’d be willing to bet money I could then predict their positions on climate change, abortion, criminal justice reform, and all of the other contemporary issues we face. In fact, I’d likely be able to guess their favorite music genres, authors, or what TV shows they enjoy. Here, I’m not trying to propose a solution to this problem. Rather, I just want to understand it and, hopefully, not fall into the same traps myself (if that’s even possible).
Finally, I want to explain the change to my parents and family. What could have possibly changed Kevin’s mind so dramatically on so many topics? Well, this is an attempt at an answer.
1 – Immature Thinking
What did I care about before; what did I think was right, and just, and important? Let’s go through the litany real quick.
My First 25 Years
Somewhere around 5th grade, in 2002, I remember saying something like, “the Republicans are the good guys,” or, “We [my family] voted for Bush.” This is paraphrased, of course, and the context is irrelevant, but hindsight is 20/20. It is clear now, as I got older, my ideas were never really very sophisticated or, in fact, my own.
In high school, in 2008, I argued against the legalization of cannabis for medicinal purposes in a debate during a “contemporary issues” class. The argument centering around the Hippocratic Oath: claiming that smoking marijuana inherently involved “doing harm” to one’s lungs and should therefore be illegal—period.
Later, during undergrad, I frequented 4chan’s /b/ and /pol/ image boards and would have proudly accepted the titles “alt-right troll”—though the phrase wasn’t being widely used yet. Later, I claimed to be a civic nationalist while waxing poetic/polemic to a friend in the back seat of a car on the way home from a wedding. My politics were generally libertarian and I was well-versed in the use of memes.
On one occasion, I went on a drunken rant to my roommates while holding up copies of the US Constitution and John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government after one roommate, messing with me, held up a copy of The Communist Manifesto and jokingly claimed it was “the greatest political document ever written.” At the time, I’m sure I had not actually read any of the three texts despite owning and storing them on a bookshelf in our living room.
During this period, I was voraciously consuming content from people like Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza, and Milo Yiannopolus. Watching videos on Youtube, reading Breitbart and The Daily Caller, and compulsively refreshing The Drudge Report.
By no means complete, here’s a list of some overarching ideas or specific policies I would have endorsed:
Human-caused climate change is a myth (here, for your horror and delight, is an essay I wrote in 9th grade on the subject).
The free market will, when deregulated, produce the best outcomes for society.
The law is synonymous with justice or, at least, approximates good ethics.
The death penalty and retributive punishment prevent crime and are morally acceptable—even righteous.
Firearms should be maximally accessible, and policies targeted at regulating gun ownership are ineffective and undesirable.
Healthcare is not a right but rather a product that should be purchased.
Factory farming or animal rights, in general, are a non-issue or, at best, a bottom-tier priority.
Of course, in 2016, I voted for Donald J. Trump. I stayed up the night he won and watched Hillary Clinton’s supporters crying at the Javits Center before cheering John Podesta as he took the stage and told the crowd, “It’s been a long night, and it’s a long campaign, and I think I can say we can wait a little longer, can’t we?” I actually watched recordings of CNN’s and MSNBC’s election night coverage over the next several months.
The following day I sat silently as my graduate school classmates cried. My professors gave what were essentially eulogies for our dead or dying democracy. One student suggested the formation of an “activist book club.” I could not understand what all the fuss was about. I laughed about it for weeks.
My Diagnosis
On the evening of January 10, 2017, I received a call from my primary care doctor. She said she was referring me to a neurologist and that my recent MRIs showed signs of multiple sclerosis.
“At least I know it’s not all in my head,” I said.
“Well, actually, it kind of is in your head,” she replied.
I appreciated the levity, and we talked a bit more about the next steps—meeting with a neurologist, etc. I was 25, five months into my engagement, one semester away from attaining my MFA in fiction writing, working two jobs, and living with my parents to save some money.
In other words, I wasn’t exactly in a bad position, relatively speaking, but this news had the potential to be life-deranging in obvious ways. However, luck would have it that my diagnosis would act as a catalyst, the first link in a causal chain that would reorient much of what I cared about.
Soon, I met my neurologist, received more MRIs, and, on January 18, 2017, received my diagnosis of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis.
Four Months in Bed
I was actually quite lucky. My new medication would likely cause significant fatigue and hamper my ability to work. Because of that, I was able to leave my graduate assistantship at the University of Missouri - St. Louis without giving up tuition remission for my final semester. My second job, a cashier at a local book store, allowed me to work solely behind the register, meaning I could work without mobility difficulty holding me back.
Outside of my 20 hours per week selling books, my only responsibility was completing my graduate thesis. For the most part, I spent this time in bed.
When you are in your mid-20s and living at home with few substantial responsibilities, the resource you have in abundance is time. When I wasn’t writing, hanging out with my wife (then fiancée), or wedding planning—though, let’s be honest, she and her family were doing most or all of the planning—I was continuing to consume YouTube content. By now, though, I was almost exclusively watching old episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience.
The Dominoes Begin to Fall
Rogan’s show was, at the time, a step in the right direction. Instead of listening to Shapiro and Yiannopolis go on about culture war issues ad nauseam, I was being exposed to a stream of relatively diverse guests.
However, it was when I came across Jordan Peterson’s appearance on the JRE on November 24, 2016, that much of my attention moved toward his videos, interviews, and writing. Soon, instead of consuming political content as a source of entertainment—“owning the libs,” in the case of Yianopolus, D’Souza’s ideologically motivated history, and Shapiro’s political commentary—I was diving into information from someone with real academic credentials. For once, I was asking myself why I believed what I believed. Sure, I would have still called myself a conservative but the motivations had changed.
The reason Peterson is relevant at all in this essay has little to do with his ideas but, rather, the approach. At the time, Peterson’s arguments seemed tied to a core ethics instead of bad faith readings of contemporary culture. Importantly, he would discuss the history of the USSR, the works of people like Nietzche and Dostoyevsky, the ideas of Carl Jung, and more in a coherent way that emphasized the importance of narrative to human culture.
In other words, there was a consistent worldview/heuristic I could immerse myself in versus a polemical personality.
Bad ideas can seem incredibly durable until an effort is made to inspect them. The process can be slow, at first, but changes tend to snowball. One of Peterson’s famous lines, “clean your room,” arrived at the right time. When my MS diagnosis arrived, I was primed with the idea that I, as an individual, could pull myself out of bed both literally and figuratively and pursue my goals.
However, though Peterson will always have a special place in my history, I quickly moved past him.
Not long after my diagnosis, maybe six months, I had a fundamental realization about the nature of my particular situation. Peterson’s words essentially amounted to self-help and had notes of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” thinking. Yes, this idea acted as a motivating force, but, without the advantages that came with an upper-middle-class life and a complete safety net.
Put simply, my situation—which I had precisely zero role in creating—is what allowed me to carry on. My realization: people in different circumstances would (and do) face immeasurable hardship when confronted by chronic illness. Idea change takes time, but this epiphany has stuck with me over the years—the “first cause” of my new ethics.
2 – Information and Awareness
The jump to having a consistent worldview—or, at least, trying to build one—was a step towards authenticity, but not an end in itself. Thinking back, it is clear that I didn’t actually believe what I thought I did. I had bad faith reasons for keeping some ideas and tossing others.
Insincere beliefs are notoriously sticky—read: Kaplan, Gimbel, and Harris in “Neural Correlates of Maintaining One’s Political Beliefs in the Face of Counterevidence,” published in Nature, 2016 (this helps explain why it took years to get to where I am currently).
Really, what I needed was a coherent, cohesive epistemology, not just a worldview (a glorified opinion). Essentially, my ideas had become siloed. That is, each specific thought, political idea, reaction to current events, or action was considered in isolation from everything else.
For example, the album Songs Around the World by the group Playing for Change came out in 2010. All covers of Bob Marley, The Beatles, and other artists, Playing for Change arranged recordings from street musicians around the world. If the name of the group doesn’t make it clear enough: this music had a “peace and love” aesthetic that didn’t exactly mesh well with the right-wing content I was otherwise consuming. I remember listening to the album and watching videos on repeat.
Waking Up
For years, my best friend—progressing on an ideological trajectory of his own—has been engaging me in conversation, exposing me to new art and music, and pointing me in the direction of new thinkers. As he attended protests during the early days of the emerging Black Lives Matter movement, I sat at home writing fiction. Politically, he became enamored by Bernie Sanders and left-leaning politics while I was taken in by Donald Trump’s brand of American exceptionalism.
Despite this, our friendship miraculously experienced relatively little conflict. From the time of my initial realizations surrounding my diagnosis through to, well, today, he has been an ever-present sounding board for anything I’ve been interested in—and vice versa.
He had been recommending I listen to Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast as early as 2016 (then called Waking Up). Harris was, in his view, an articulate communicator of complex ideas acting in good faith. Ironically, Harris hosted Jordan Peterson on his podcast in January 2017, That summer, I finally listened.
The podcast—What is True, #62—ends up with Harris and Peterson getting wrapped around an axel trying to define “truth.” Peterson comes across as somewhat inarticulate and his explanation smells something like the postmodern relativists he so often complains about. Harris struggles with this concept—advocating for a more objective conception of truth. My immediate, tribal reaction was to defend Peterson, but the battle was effectively over.
The Influence of Audio
Once again, MS takes the driver’s seat of my changing thinking. While reading an essay out loud in a fiction theory class in 2016, I stumbled across my own sentences and couldn’t make out my classmates’ or professor’s faces. In the coming months, the vision loss subsided or, more likely, it stabilized and I got used to it. Post-diagnosis, that loss continued and, though I am far from blind, audio became far more accessible than TV or text.
This was convenient as it turns out. I turned away from YouTube and stopped reading articles from Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and The Daily Wire. In their place, I started listening to podcasts—especially Waking Up/Making Sense; downloaded apps like Audm to listen to articles published in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and others; and tackled a growing reading list using Audible.
Over time, listening to a glut of more rigorous, truthful content shifted my perspective. More nuanced or opposing lines of reasoning soon countered all of the ideas listed in part 1 of this piece, among others.
Okay, that is all well and good, but am I really claiming that belief change—down to the level of ethics and epistemology—is as simple as listening to some new content? Sort of, but it is more arduous than that. To be clear, I was essentially forced into listening to audio content and was simultaneously being bowled over by the realization that I was, in fact, lucky.
In my opinion, then, fundamental changes in belief require strong external forces or actors. The horrific example of this is the character Alex’s forced transformation in A Clockwork Orange (interestingly enough, the moral difficulty in the novel/film is that the involuntary change is actually good for society and, maybe, Alex himself). No, my diagnosis was not the same experience, of course, but the analogy holds.
I’m not putting a recommendation out there for how to solve the problem of ideological rigidity. Rather, I’m simply stating that this problem is tremendously difficult to overcome. Does positive epistemological transformation really require trauma or difficulty in the presence of privilege? Hopefully not, but that’s what it took for me.
3 – Introspection
Ideological malleability per se is not a goal we should aspire to. It is not hard to imagine a dystopian hellscape where, instead of all breaking out into political tribes who don’t listen or talk to each other, individuals and groups are constantly changing their positions. Institutional flux would be an utter disaster at all levels of our society (this is, I think, the best defense of conservatism out there).
Wherever an ideal individual or society falls on the spectrum of rigidity vs. malleability (no, this should not be mistaken as an appeal to political centrism), what is most critical is good faith. Acting and thinking in good faith, though, is about more than just consuming the “correct” content or making the right noises. More important is the commitment to living an examined life.
We must ask ourselves the questions: “why do I believe what I believe?” and “am I being consistent?” and “who or what am I affecting, and how?”
