To promote a free society, we have a considerable battle to be heard by people who disagree with us, and we have much to learn from them too.
That’s why I launched The Provocation People with my friend and LSE behavioural scientist, Professor Paul Dolan. Our society and the organisations within it need to embed tolerance by design in order to make better decisions and be more innovative, productive and happier. We need diversity of thought and The Provocation People is here to help.
To start the year, Paul released our episode of his Breaking Beliefism podcast and we recorded the above discussion of Beliefism, New Year’s resolutions and happiness by design.
I am incredibly proud of the range and quality of our discussion in the full Breaking Beliefism podcast. We covered:
Beliefism, Paul’s term for discriminating against people who hold different beliefs.
The difficulties and dangers of groupthink, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The role of fear in entrenching majority views and alienating those who question them.
The interplay between beliefs, identity, and social ties.
Challenges in discussing complex policy without being branded an extremist.
Adversarial collaboration: cooperating on specific issues while disagreeing on others.
How open disagreement is more explicit in politics, sometimes making it (paradoxically) more straightforward to collaborate across party lines.
The notion that people across the political spectrum do care about fairness, but differ on definitions and policy solutions.
Plus Christianity, self-importance, snobbery, skydiving and Coldplay.
If we are going to fight for a free future successfully in 2025, we will need to be better at engaging with those we disagree with. That is what The Provocation People is about.
A very happy new year and if you like the podcast, please share it. There’s plenty of social media on my channels.
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