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by jasonzemos 1368 days ago
You make it sound so simple. Becoming a group member in this context means corrupting oneself. You are what you do. You are the last action you take. If you deceive the other externally while holding different positions internally, you are those external positions, and the internal is the deception. Those that lie to themselves this way have nothing to offer the group and will certainly never "make a change from the inside."
2 comments

More books for you :-)

Never Split the Difference. And Nonviolent Communication.

Because just listening to others, and showing that you care about and understand what they're saying, can go a long way. Not always a need to actually do anything in the real world (or to say or pretend that you agree).

Maybe theoretically this won't place you in their old group, still, you'll a bit form a new group where you and that other person are friends

Or you become a traitor to everyone and are rewarded as one deserves.

These tactics are just that, they are not strategies. They are not long term successful or sustainable.

The things on your mind are misunderstandings. Not sure exactly what you think, but what you wrote made no sense to me.

It seems you haven't read any of the books.

I did use the listening technique in Never Split... and it worked well, and long term good effects too for everyone. -- When listening to the other person, one gets a bit more open oneself -- sometimes the other person does have (partly) good ideas (although not in that case) and it's simpler to find something that works.

I don't see it that way - I think of it as a linguistic challenge. Every group's thoughts are limited by the language the group adopts. Learning a group's language makes one more prone to think as that group does, but it also allows one to keep those ideas at arm's length. And if an idea is difficult to communicate in a group's language, that doesn't make it deceptive to hold it, especially if one makes good-faith attempts to communicate important ideas using the group's language.

And while it is true that some groups hold language and ideas that are both infectious and dangerous, arms-length exposure to many such ideas is much less likely to result in pathology than close exposure to one. Refusing to learn an enemy tribe's language is an uninformed bet that you lucked into the best tribe by default.