Powerful people are not amenable to reason in the naively straightforward sense where someone tells a true thing at them a lot and then they act like they believe it. Nevertheless, there are complicated sociopolitical pathways by which the actions of powerful systems and players can be influenced to make them act in accordance with some ground truth of reality. You can tell by how, for example, a lot of institutions act like gravity is a real thing, or like there are such things as “crime” or “natural disasters”, or by how they’re continually forced to acknowledge the preferences of novel social movements (e. g., sexual minorities).
It is not easy or straightforward, but it is not hopelessly undoable.
I agree it isn’t hopeless. But I do think that if someone only conforms to something when they are forced to (including truth and reason) we can’t say that they care about the thing, we can at most say that they treat it as a constraint.
Powerful people are not amenable to reason in the naively straightforward sense where someone tells a true thing at them a lot and then they act like they believe it. Nevertheless, there are complicated sociopolitical pathways by which the actions of powerful systems and players can be influenced to make them act in accordance with some ground truth of reality. You can tell by how, for example, a lot of institutions act like gravity is a real thing, or like there are such things as “crime” or “natural disasters”, or by how they’re continually forced to acknowledge the preferences of novel social movements (e. g., sexual minorities).
It is not easy or straightforward, but it is not hopelessly undoable.
I agree it isn’t hopeless. But I do think that if someone only conforms to something when they are forced to (including truth and reason) we can’t say that they care about the thing, we can at most say that they treat it as a constraint.