You Should Already Know That

The other day I watched a video for Ben Shapiro talking about the transition of Actor Eliot Page (previously Actress Ellen Page) from female into male. Ben Shapiro, being a right-wing commentator, started talking his usual non-sense about how confusing this is, whether we should still consider "her" a lesbian, whether that make "her" wife straight, and that we should still have the right to call "her" a woman because "she still is".

A few days later, I stumbled upon another video, a response to Ben Shapiro. In this video, the commentator went over Shapiro's video, laughed about it, called Shapiro a trans-phobic, talked about how we don't need to keep discussing those things, mentioned that Shapiro's motives are clear, etc.

Now, let's imagine someone on the right, her name is Cloé. She listened to Ben Shapiro, who presented arguments that looked extremely reasonable to her, but somehow, a moment of clarity descended upon her, and she decided to google "Response to Ben Shapiro", and ended up with this response video. She will conclude that "Yeah, Shapiro was right. Those left-wing snowflakes don't have any substance. Facts don't care about your feelings!"

 

The biggest problem I keep seeing with the left-wing narrative, is that they treat a counter-intuitive stance as the intuitive one, and assume that it requires no explanation. In reality, it requires effort, open-mindedness, and research to believe this narrative. When you look in front of you and see certain systematic differences between genders or races, your intuition tells you that these genders and races must be fundamentally different. When you look and see trans people looking like women but saying they are men, your intuition tells you there is something wrong about this. When the majority of people you know self-identify as one of two genders and you see someone saying they're gender-fluid, your intuition tells you that this is absolute non-sense. This is what our human intuition tells us: "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck". Our intuition tells us to give the simplest explanation to whatever we see in front of us. 

But, we know from history that our intuition is often wrong. Our intuition told us that the Sun orbits the Earth, and that an object can only exist in one place at a given time. Copernicus, and the Quantum Mechanics gang showed us the falsehood of those intuitions, respectively. But it required effort, research, and a lot of hard work to battle these intuitions, and some of these battles still go on until today.

When a left-wing advocate says that "you should already know that", they are assuming that such an effort is not needed to believe in these ideas, and that it is immediately clear why they are correct. Well, let me tell you something: The majority of the World think your ideas are non-sense. I come from countries where people laugh at them, and find them absolute non-sense. I was one of them, and I stayed that way for a long time. I was only convinced after doing a good amount of research, and I still find some details objectionable.

So why doesn't everyone do their required research?

1. Most people live in their own bubbles, and don't tend to research ideas outside of what they are used to. Open-mindedness comes very rarely, and in very small bursts, like the moment our friend Cloé had. If all Cloé found during that moment was useless, angry response videos, her convictions will be enforced instead of shaken
2. Whether we like it or not, political convictions are highly affected by where we are born, what social groups surround us, and what experiences we go through. We like to think we have reached our political views by deep thinking and research, but the reality is most of us did not.

In conclusion, I believe that:

• We should acknowledge that our political stance might not be immediately clear to everyone, and we should act that way
• If we don't wish to re-explain something over and over again, we should at least always refer to some good reference to explain it every time we mention it (hats off to the1janitor for doing exactly that)
  
• We should always be humble, and remember that it is very possible that, under different circumstances, we might have been standing on the opposite side of this battle