Stage 1: Learn How to See:
How Power Distorts Reality: Language can be manipulated and powerful people do it all the time in ways you're not even conscious of how they affect you. What we perceive as the truth can be socially controlled and we have to vigilantly look for how it's being controlled. Everything we see in any public space whether real or virtual is part of a system, and even among the smartest of us, systems shape how we see everything. Try to recognize propaganda wherever you see it, from whatever direction it comes, and resist what it wants you to believe.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
1984 by George Orwell
How To Morally Read Human Beings: Before you go off to college and any theories you learn bend your sense of reality in their own directions, learn how to empathize with people. Try to empathize with them, but try also not to be naive about how they can exploit your empathy. Do not let decent people off the hook for how they neglect societal problems, but also realize that decent people fail all the time: their courage, their perceptions, their virtue itself. That does not make them indecent, it makes them people. People, even decent people, will go to any length to not see how they belittle others if it's unflattering to their quality of life. They will pressure you to do the same. Value us, revere us for what we do right, don't fall into what we do wrong.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
What Suffering Actually Looks Like: Suffering isn't just something that happens to far off people, it's very, very real, and however much you're suffering, someone is probably suffering worse just a couple miles away. Whenever a person is suffering they will be tempted to abandon everything they once valued, because it could not protect them from suffering. But even in those moments, maybe especially in those moments, you learn what you can hang onto, what is real, what is meaningful, and what can carry you through until those moments pass and life starts blessing you a bit again.
Night by Elie Wiesel
Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel
How Identity Shapes Perception: There is such a thing as 'lived experience.' You may think you can imagine your way into other people, but the real experience of what it's like to be them is different in a million ways, and things you think you know they come to know with far greater weight and consequence. A person has two identities: one is their own identity and their capacity to think and act and choose, and the identity which the world assigns them: race, gender, class, etc. It is inevitable then that other people will inevitably see the same occurrences completely differently, and a narrow majority of the time, they will see it from the vantage of their societal position. People will trust 'their own' long before they trust someone different, and inevitably privileges accumulate more in some circles rather than others. This does not mean that people without privileges are victims, but it does mean that life often presents more frequent challenges for them. People are shaped by their circumstances, not determined by them, but if we want to make that more apparent to those who incur more frequent challenges, it may help to occasionally give them a helping hand. Most people acknowledge that, but they define 'help' very very differently.
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. du Bois
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
How to Think Without Locking Into Ideology: Being unsure is not a weakness, and it's not the same as 'standing for nothing.' It's normal to see contradictions in what people believe, it's normal to see hypocrisies in people's actions. They generally do the best they can, and the people who have an entirely consistent belief system we generally call 'crazy.' The point of any form of inquiry is not to find the right answer, but to find the 'most right' answer until new evidence presents itself that changes your perceptions yet again. You do the best you can with the information you're given, forgive yourself if you get it wrong, but admit you were wrong.
Essays by Michel de Montaigne: Of the Education of Children, Of Experience, Of Cannibals, Of Custom, That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die, Of Solitude, Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions, Of Three Kinds of Association, Of Presumption, Of Repentance (advanced)
Why People Disagree: Perception is not a matter of the head. We want to think we're rational beings, but the rationality is just the top layer. Before we're rational, we are a bunch of nerves, responsive to stimulus, and different nerves are responsive to different stimuli. Our responses to most things in life are pre-rational, I could give a hundred examples but you'll be reading this rather than the books. And not only are our responses rational, but also the conclusions we draw from our responses. Our beliefs are not particularly rational either, and it is only with education and learning that we begin to form responses more cognitively reasonable. This is why when emotionally fraught topics are brought up, people who disagree become viscerally angry so frequently, their minds are changed so seldomly, and ostensible conversation turns into combat. There is no such thing as an entirely rational exchange of ideas. Ideas only exist on a plateau we can't see, when they come down to earth, they are bound up in emotions, sensations, memories and desires.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
How Systems Fail Even When Intentions Are Good: 'Lived experience' is real, and the best evidence of that is that every plan that looks great on paper works differently when tested in reality. Reality is the study of the tension between expectations and the unexpected. Planners will inevitably simplify the problems: if they factored in every potential problem, the plan would never get done. Nothing is guaranteed to behave the way we will assume it will, and there will always be side effects, and those side effects can sometimes be more harmful than the solution ever was.
What matters more than the plan itself is the problem, and what matters within the problem is the people who live those problems. They are the ones who know how communities function: what their unwritten rules and codes are, how problems usually get solved, the history and context which created the problem and may influence the solution. The more orderly and streamlined the solution, the less adaptive it is likely to be, and the more its solutions can collapse and create consequences that are harder to solve than the original problem. The people living the problem don't understand the new rules and long for the way things were in the initial system that created the problem everybody's trying to solve. Meanwhile, the planners believe that all which is needed is to apply the solution more strictly and drastically--thereby turning potential problems into disasters.
Some people will tell you to trust traditional solutions and that reform isn't necessary, others will tell you to put your trust in the solution and forget how things already worked. Depending on the problem, people will tell you either/or from any ideological orientation, but any solution that pre-supposes it fully understands the problem is a solution unlikely to work.
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
What It Feels Like to be Alienated from the World: Communities will tell you you're supposed to feel a certain way about some particular person, place, thing or situation. People generally assume that their lives have a prescribed meaning: perhaps people need their lives to have a prescribed meaning in order to function properly: but what happens in those moments when you no longer feel that way? Sometimes it can feel like the walls of reality coming apart, and sometimes it just seems funny, and it always feels like everybody who buys into those meanings is just putting on a show. Many adolescents feel that way: they don't feel invested in communities that did not understand or invest in them, and when communities feel a certain way at a certain event, they don't share that same feeling.
Adolescents often feel that way, so do highly intelligent people, so do people dealing with depression and anxiety, so do regular people under stress. If you feel that way, it doesn't mean anything is wrong with you, and it doesn't mean that anything is wrong with anybody else. It's just another part of being human. We all have to learn to relate within communities, but we also have to learn to be individuals within those communities with our own perceptions of what they believe are true and false, moral and immoral, and still not feel the need to reject the whole thing.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Don't worry about being informed. Just be hard to fool, slow to judge, able to sit with complicated situations without judging them. Question authority and their language, but recognize that authorities are usually in situations that are more complicated than they may look. Suffering is very real, but not all solutions solve suffering, and you have to be able to wait until a workable solution presents itself. Whatever your conclusions, whatever your uncertainties, other people will disagree with you and doubt you, whether or not they can tolerate complexity, your goal should be to do exactly that regardless of them.
