call and response--a questionable tangent

In a recent blog there was talk of consensus, talk of never winning someone over on a principled argument about Big Beliefs.

Using vagueness as a pole vault he made some heralding connections between astro phyics and a spirituality that isn't Christianity and makes no references to Buddhism. I stood by one of these fellas at a party tonight. He was really working it. Trying to gain a disciple from the other side.

How to get someone to switch sides:
First, you have to be intimately satisfied with an invisible win because none of your peers will see that you won. Not until later when you tell them in private. "It was all a strategy. I was a plant, a plainclothes among them."

At that point your peers will laugh at you with a simple, "yeah, right." Because they can, first and foremost. It's what I'd do. Take the laugh first, then follow it with sincere listening and dialogue. So they don't feel too needled and also because you're interested, genuinely interested. Ideally, that is. Sometimes there's still slack on the leash of the joke. Gotta run like a dog until the lash. Because you have to ask the question: what if it went on forever? What if the end was really far away? The leash disappears. Was there ever even a leash on this one? There almost always is a leash. The slack is generally shorter than optimism. So yeah, needle them until it isn't funny, but then buy the other story. The one that we always sort of knew was true. That it really was a disguise. That he didn't really think we should stop using ballast water in the harbor.

So maybe there's a little doubt hanging over the authenticity. I get that.

Solutions exist, is all I'm saying. I didn't say there'd be no side effects.

How often do the participants of point for point arguments that are chalked full of loosely connected metaphors (see astro physics) change sides, make large public concessions, start dressing like you?

Almost never.

Unless you infiltrate. Agree with them and publicly side with them. Do so aggressively, in the most uneducated and flawed way. Love their side so openly and stupidly that later that night or perhaps later that week they'll think back and cringe. "Is this really my niche?" they'll ask. And slowly the humidity of humiliation sloughs the skin and stimulates the churning hormone. In the same way we are repelled by the smell of shit.

Soon you're both at the same rally. The recruited sees you in astonishment, surprised that the man who embodied a motive for departure is standing there with an identical picket sign. "What are you doing here?"
"It just makes more sense to me now," you say. "And you?"
"Yeah, me too," is all they'll say. And then you've had her.