What If Everything We Think We Know about Social Change Is... Wrong?

Interesting, but the 30 first minutes wasn't all that convincing. A lot of strawmen (All the numbered quotes are points the presenter sees as mostly untrue). Wall of text follows:

1. Change individuals

To use the forest fire metaphor used to explain away the need to change individuals. You need a dry forest to get a forest fire going. That means most individual trees need to be dry. How do you dry a bunch of trees? Shine light on them, and restrict rain.

How do you get a bunch of people to be responsive to an idea? It's quite much harder. He didn't make a convincing argument here I think. Rather he just implied that society is already metaphorically dry, without giving much reason.

2. Change behaviour

We need to change how people and corporations behave, not how they think.

I'm not sure who actually believes this in the first place. Thinking almost always precedes changes in behavior. When did you ever change without thinking about it first? To quote the video:

Scholars now believe that in human beings beliefs drive behavior

Who knew, huh? One thing I think we actually can take away from this is that we should be content with changing people's thinking about animals, without expecting them to change immediately.

The slavery argument was also a bit strange, I don't know all that much about the period, but I do know slavery was outlawed, due to a social movement. Ie. due to pivotal support from a large enough part of the population.

3. Be nice

Don't be angry, disruptive or critical. That makes us seem crazy.

It's fully possible to be critical, disruptive and nice at the same time. I don't think it's a great strategy being angry, though it will obviously happen from time to time.

More to the point. You need to speak in a language that actually have some support in the population. This means that it's not obvious that hard language like that used in the slavery period will be effective with animal rights today.

If I would take something away from this video it's the importance of making the people around you receptive ideas of animal rights, to speak up in a manner that people can understand. Ironically he seems to spend most of his time talking about creating the spark which he at the start of the video said was arbitrary, instead of actually talking about how to dry the forest.

In the end the problem with most of his references is that they deal with human rights movements. Which all are driven by the people being oppressed. When black people rebelled they could count on support from other black people who also was oppressed. There was a large part of the population naturally receptive to the idea of change, because they personally dealt with the problems. The number of people being oppressed due to the lack of animal rights? Zero. The animal rights movement doesn't have the same natural support that most human rights movement do. That's something we actually have to understand.

All this isn't saying that DXE isn't doing good work. But I truly didn't find these arguments very compelling.

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