Anna Mercury
1 min readDec 30, 2024

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These facts are valuable, but the truth of my experience (backed up by a lot of psychological studies) is that facts don’t change minds. Feelings and experience change minds. In my humble opinion, switching the conversation away from facts into feelings, things like “What would it mean to you if climate change were really happening and dire?” “What about your current lifestyle are you unwilling to let go of?” / or, if they’re an annoying bro / macho uncle type, hitting them where it hurts their ego by acknowledging their fear and trying to talk to that, is marginally more effective. But most of all, talking to people about what a different kind of world we could live in if we didn’t spend our lives trying to feed
colonial capitalism (but don’t
use either of those C words with most Conservatives) gets people to start thinking about their own grievances with these systems and how they too might want the world to change. It’s not just climate change that hurts everyone on the planet. Industrialism, capitalism and colonialism, exploiting land and people - in sum, the things that cause climate change - are also bad for everyone.

PS, as an aside, instead of saying “socialism,” try talking about “economic democracy” instead ;)

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Anna Mercury
Anna Mercury

Written by Anna Mercury

Animist anarchist, once and future forest-person, trying to write a new world with the ashes of the old | www.allgodsnomasters.com

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