If your uncle died of lung cancer, and you saw the pictures of a smokers' lungs and brain, wouldn't you feel a bit disgusted? Wouldn't you feel disgusted about smoking? Wouldn't it have the same impact on you as it had on me, that I decided to never smoke in my whole life?
Wouldn't you stop smoking as well?
This is not a debate about smoking, but a discussion about why some of us (especially people like me), enjoy sharing information with others not just for the sake of sharing the information, but also because we feel that if others had the same experience and/or knew the same things about something, they would change their beliefs about it in a similar way we did, and also change their behavior.
This is not mainly/only to discuss about how efficient or useful it is to persuade someone and try to "convert" them (I think this depends on each individuals' charisma and personal influence), but on why we try to "convert" others and whether it might be a wrong feeling after all.
The question arose in another topic (
Why do you discuss on forums? Is it always good?) in which I ask whether it is better to suggest my sometimes radically different approaches to life, or simply "live and let live" by my models so that others can - if they want - decide to follow me.
I further elaborated on my feeling (
Why do you discuss on forums? Is it always good?), which I will summarize:
I feel that if others ("humans") are similar to me, then they should also react the same way as me if all our information and knowledge was the same (as in the example of smoking) - conversely, I sometimes also feel that if others behave differently from me, they must be having some information or experience that I don't have...
In both cases, what I am searching for is a sort of coherence and conformity, in which both parties agree on a final conclusion... since both parties are similar.
Don't you also expect people who are similar to you to reach similar conclusions as yourself? Similar beliefs, and, as a consequence, similar decisions? If they don't... don't you pause a while and wonder about the reason of the difference?
Discuss
