Ideological Resistance Training

Video related.

Resistance training isn't just for your muscles, it can also help strengthen your intellectual resolve against the forces of autocracy, authoritarianism, and fascism. Like strength resistance training, you must exercise to some level of discomfort in order to increase your resiliency. Now, this is not me telling you to go read 48 Laws of Power or start immersing yourself with Fascists. Nor is this asking you to take on the position of racists, sexists, homophobes, or their prejudices. But it's about examining studying why you believe what you believe and your own cognitive bias.

What are the core tenants, in my opinion of ideological resistance?
1. Practice Socratic Questioning
2. Identify Your Own Cognitive Dissonance
3. Steelman the Opposition to Identify Gaps in Your Defenses

I. Practice Socratic Questioning

What are your core beliefs and why do you hold them? What evidence do you have to support them? We're not talking about things like fundamental truths like believing in climate change or not being bigoted. We're exploring things a bit deeper, a bit higher level. Separate out what you "know" and what you "understand". We think we have already fully digested what we've learned as something we know, but do you truly? The simple test of being able to explain what you "know" will expose true understanding.

Now that you've consolidated these core beliefs, what challenges them? What would fundamentally threaten them or make you change your mind? Then we can move onto...

II. Identifying Your Own Cognitive Dissonance

Know your media. Who is informing your core beliefs? Where do they fall on the media bias chart? I'm not telling you to take the both sides approach or saying that you must only read the dry, unfiltered Reuters or AP report, but know that language is part of the presentation of manipulation. The more you can minimize this the less susceptible you will be to propaganda. This is not limited to just news. Consume challenging media. For example, I despise Ari Aster movies and I fundamentally disagree with his assessment on human nature but I still watch his movies to try to better understand him as an artist.

We are all capable of cognitive dissonance no matter how enlightened or educated we think we might be. Be able to identify bias in language that is meant as an appeal to emotion rather than values no matter which side is presenting it, yours included. Once you've detached yourself from the argument, are you still having trouble reconciling your values from your actions? If so then you have some level of cognitive dissonance and you must take steps to align the two. If it is irreconcilable then either it is not a core belief or you must adjust your perspective. You must accept the discomfort in order to grow.

Once you're comfortable then you can start exposing your core beliefs to their weakest arguments. Construct strong counterarguments as if you were debating yourself. Or are you not presently aware of any contradictions or challenges to your current world view? Maybe start there.

III. Steelman the Opposition to Identify Gaps in Your Defenses

Steelmanning an argument is an exercise to understand the opposition in the most clear and credible form to understand the gap in clarity between positions. The purpose is to create dialogue and not necessarily to win an argument. That said we're not using steelmanning to argue with people, we're using it to strengthen our own defenses to actors who would exploit the gap against you. We're building the strongest possible argument against us to identify weaknesses in our own position and understand where the opposition has an advantage in the power of persuasion. From there you should be able to recognize astroturfing, whitewashing, PR, marketing, and other forms of manipulation especially nowadays on social media by non-state actors.