A wound that we carried became the Crusade

The Poem

We think that we argue with logic and light,
But the war in the room is invisible — inside.
You’re not fighting a fact when you’re fighting tonight,
You are fighting the person who lives in their pride.
A belief isn’t held like a book on a shelf,
It is worn like a skin, like a name, like a scar.
To challenge the idea is to challenge the self,
And the self will defend itself, near or far.
So the harder you push, the more deeply they dig,
The more certain they feel as you prove them all wrong.
The argument planted a doubt that grew big,
So they held to their story, they made it more strong.
We were not born with these views fully made,
We were broken by something we never could say.
A wound that we carried became the crusade,
An old pain became armor we carry today.
The emotion came first — long before the belief,
Before the philosophy, before the firm stand.
An experience seeking its narrative relief,
A trembling heart reaching for somewhere to land.
And reason arrived like a lawyer retained,
To argue a case that was already won.
The verdict was settled, the jury was trained,
The mind was the courtroom — and so it was done.
No study was needed, no figure, no chart,
The judgment was carved in the marrow and bone.
You cannot reach someone by way of their mind
When the road that you need runs directly through heart.
So if you would reach them, don’t carry a sword,
Don’t marshall your data, don’t build up your case.
Sit still for a moment, and pull up a chair,
And ask them the question that opens a space.
Not “why are you wrong?” but “where did this start?
What part of your living convinced you of this?”
For that is the doorway — not proof and not art,
But the quiet of wondering what you might miss.
The mind will change only when something in it
Grows curious enough to consider the cost.
Not when it’s beaten, not when it’s been hit,
But when it decides that it’s willing to cross.
We don’t change our minds when we lose in the fight,
We change when we’re curious enough to explore.
Not when we’re shamed in the merciless light,
But when we feel safe enough to open the door.
So speak to the wound that first seeded the thought,
Speak to the human behind what they claim.
The battle of argument cannot be fought

When the person defending is fighting their name.

…

DCG

Analysis of the Core Statements
This argument rests on five interlocking ideas:

Belief is identity — People do not hold beliefs the way they hold opinions about pizza. They fuse beliefs with who they are.
Arguments feel like attacks — When you challenge the belief, the person experiences it as a personal assault on the self, triggering defensive entrenchment.
Emotion precedes reason — Beliefs are not constructed from facts up. They are built from emotional experiences first, and reason is recruited afterward to justify them.
Emotional pain seeds belief — Prior wounds, fears, and lived pain create fertile ground for specific beliefs to take hold — the belief soothes or explains the pain.

5. Curiosity, not argument, changes minds — When people do shift their views, it is not because they were defeated in debate. It is because genuine curiosity about why you believe what you believe created an opening.

Scientific Support — The Research is Robust
Jonathan Haidt — The Elephant and the Rider
Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model is the cornerstone study here. Haidt’s decades of research, summarized in The Righteous Mind (2012), demonstrated that moral and political beliefs are driven primarily by gut-level intuition — the emotional “elephant” — while conscious reasoning functions as a press secretary for the elephant, constructing post-hoc justifications. According to his Moral Foundations Theory, people are “morally dumbfounded” — they know something feels wrong but cannot explain why, which proves the emotion came first.
Dan Kahan — Identity-Protective Cognition
Dan Kahan of Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project coined the term “identity-protective cognition” — the unconscious tendency to process evidence in ways that shield one’s group identity rather than reach accurate conclusions. Critically, his research shows that higher intelligence and science literacy actually amplify this effect. Smarter people are better at motivated reasoning — they construct more sophisticated defenses of beliefs they were never willing to change.
Claude Steele — Self-Affirmation Theory
Steele’s landmark 1988 work at Stanford established that the self-system is constantly engaged in maintaining a sense of moral and adaptive adequacy. When beliefs tied to identity are threatened, the entire self feels threatened, not just the idea. The self mobilizes defensively. Sherman and Cohen’s extensions of this work confirmed that reducing this self-threat — through affirmation — is one of the only reliable ways to open a person to reconsidering a belief.
Leon Festinger — Cognitive Dissonance
Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory (1957) laid the groundwork: people experience genuine psychological discomfort when new information conflicts with held beliefs, and they work to eliminate that discomfort — most often by rejecting the new information rather than changing the belief.
Nyhan & Reifler — The Backfire Effect
Nyhan and Reifler (2010) documented the “backfire effect” — corrections to political misinformation sometimes caused people to believe the false claim more strongly. While later meta-analyses by Wood and Porter (2019) found the effect is less universal than originally claimed, the core dynamic — resistance to correction under conditions of identity threat — is thoroughly supported.
NIH Neuroscience — Belief as Self-Referential Processing
A 2024 NIH neuroimaging study found that challenges to political beliefs activate the brain’s Default Mode Network — specifically the regions governing self-referential processing and introspection. The brain literally treats a political argument the same way it treats a threat to the self.
APA — Curiosity as a Change Agent

APA research on curiosity and practical communication analysis confirm your final point: curiosity — not argument — is the lever of genuine persuasion. A conversation that induces curiosity about why you believe what you believe creates the only real opening for change.

The Concise Argument

We do not argue about facts. We argue about who we are.
Beliefs are not ideas we carry — they are identities we inhabit. When someone challenges your belief, your nervous system does not register it as a debate. It registers it as a threat to the self. You don’t think your way to a belief; you feel your way there first, often through pain, loss, or fear that needed an explanation. Reason arrives after the fact to build the case. This is why more facts, better arguments, and louder voices almost never change minds — they only harden them. The only documented pathway to genuine belief change is curiosity: a person’s own willingness to wonder why someone else sees the world differently. You cannot argue someone out of a position they did not argue themselves into.

Meaning in Our Existence

November 18, 13November 18, 13 ~ DC ~ Leave a comment

How much time and effort do you spend thinking that maybe you might be incorrect and wrong about what you know about life and your role in it? Are you fulfilled in the life you are leading, and does it beg the question why is there so much discontent? Is there something that you believe is fundamentally wrong with the world but you can’t put your finger on it, or is it an issue that you believe you can do nothing since you are only one person?

I surmise that reflective people would agree that if the sum total of events that create a person’s life are siphoned, managed, and processed through their conscious perceptions (additionally at times their unconscious perceptions), and furthermore their intuitions, and ideas also share this evaluation, then these impressions could be ultimately channeled through the logic of their belief systems, about themselves and the world, thus deriving a world view inclusive of their persona’s ego. This world-view would include the known thoughts and feelings of others that we listen to, and those who influence us and our thinking. The phenomena of experience can indeed shape us over time and is a major reason for our questioning the meaning in our lives and the meaning of a life that we create. The sources of information we trust are only as effective as we allow them when they align with our thoughts, feelings and beliefs.

In the course of a person’s life, challenges to their ideas, beliefs, and feelings from others may result in a re-evaluation of their assessment of themselves. Life can be a challenge for many reasons, and even more so for those in the scrutiny of others depending on their place in the civic world.

One starts to question the foundation of their belief system when it is challenged by people who face you with a different view. People you know, people in your family or professional life that will often comment on their observations of your status in some way. Even more disturbing is when the unexpected counter-message that differs from your own beliefs is brought to you over a period of time and it seems to still be a surprise to you. For obvious reasons delusion, denial, and deceit among many other possibilities will disrupt a person if they are not ready for that contingency. This includes that an awareness of all perceptions of the events are known, or that each side of the experience is contemplated.

Other reasons for reaching this plane of thought is when the chronological and emotional maturity levels of an individual strikes us and makes us do things that try to remind us of a younger self, or alternatively tries to fill a void in the angst we are experiencing in some other way of acting out as a result from these feelings. A balancing maneuver to equalize the disturbance perhaps. The mid-life crisis as shown takes on many avenues in fruition. Other reasons for asking these philosophical questions earlier than in the mid-life cycle of an adult is that one may experience something that disrupts their world view, weather or not it is conscious or something that compels them from a subconscious directive. Something that makes them ponder more than what they now experience and suggests that they need something else to replace or supplement their condition as they see it. Maybe some experience that crushed their world view in some way, or someone who challenged them to be more than what they have become could be the impetus that makes them take some form of action to correct this discovery. The death of a close one, or family member, or some other catastrophic event that made them approach their lives from an entirely different perspective. For me many questions arose at a very early age when I began to search for a better possible life because of the family chaos that evoked trauma and suffering as I was growing up.

The awakening at an early part of my life was when I was exposed to the work of W. Somerset Maugham‘s 1944 novel which was then turned into the 1946 film The Razor’s Edge. The remake in 1984 would emerge and would lead me to the earlier works which I can say changed me from that day forward.

It was the first time that I identified with the main character Larry Durrell, finding an affinity that matched my own yearning passion. Weather the character is based on a real person or if it is purely a fictional character, the answer may never be truly be known for sure. (see the wanderling for further clarification).

“The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.”

-W. Somerset Maugham, THE RAZOR’S EDGE-

The learning of such a character was only an outlet in my realization that others too searched for answers they did not quite understand. Seeing this on film, and then reading the book made me more aware than ever before just how I was not alone in this mad quest for wanting more out of life. The stigma of not being able to fit in with others at times was largely due to my nature, my continual quest for answers as I watched others my age act to impress their peers, or act to attract attention from others. They acted in ways that led me to question why does this ego thing always interfere with our dealings in the world. The sociology in youth is a very powerful force upon the group if the mind is still not ready for the austerity of the undeveloped mind.

I do not claim that I have any benefit from this vantage point at this time simply because I realized I knew nothing and used my observation skills to learn what others had demonstrated to me. It was out of these times that I wandered and floated through my existence knowing that there was something more powerful for me to connect with, than just what some of my peers were exposing me to. I also learned that it is essential to take risks, to meet life head on, and not to be an armchair observer. One must take part, socialize and navigate the social realm, or they would quite possibly lose out on many lessons to be learned, and in extreme cases resort to becoming a recluse. I remember the term we used in relationships between men and women of my age during our adolescence. If we were stricken to being immature or had over-exacerbated ego’s, than we would treat each other in ways that would result in our identifying this treatment as playing “Games.”

The basic reason for game playing in relationships is to acquire something desired. Wanting an emotional or a tangible reward presents a reason to use covert tactics. Some games have become such a part of the personality that the gamer hardly realizes he or she is involved in a game of psychological cat and mouse. Most of these tactics seem to be ego related and combined with a lack of social skill it can make a risky combo. Even to this day I see adults continuing to “play” off of each other in many different types of relationships. What is sad is that many still do not know why they resort to such efforts, since it is all they know, or that they have not yet learned better methods for acquiring the desired object. The thought of rejection, or to protect the fragile ego may be a reason for such tactics, but the risk involved does have a price.

So again I ask, what moves you? What is there in life that eludes you and makes you want something more from it that you are not receiving? For as many people who ask these questions, there are also as many answers that will continue to evade some, and touch others. To be human is to answer and ask! To be human is to succeed and fail. To be human is to seek and succumb. The choice you make is the life you give the presence to. The meaning you assign is the reality you live. Which life will you choose?