Pile of Sand

Can a pile of sand become a person?  No.  It cannot.  It might be lots better if it would be that than that pile, but it just won't happen.  

Imagine how one could.  If the electrons in the atoms constituting that pile of sand left their home proton and attached to another proton instead, they could be part of new molecules.  That pile of sand could become a person who was orgasming, enjoying extremely good food, or being very much in love with someone else.  You probably think that all of those situations are better than being just a pile of sand.  Yet, how much talking to the sand will you have to do to make the sand realize it should be a person instead?  

Try talking to the pile of sand for a whole day.  A whole year.  100 years straight.  How often does the sand change into a person?  

Yeah, okay, but what if you have a projector and lot of charts and visual aids to explain how cool it is to be a person?  What if you set that projector up with a screen upon which that projector can project so that the sand can see it?  And you have a moving soundtrack and lots of really good examples?  What if you do that talking for a billion years straight?  A trillion?  (During that time, explain to the sand with the best examples possible, with a few trillion trillion pieces of really good evidence.)  

That’s right.  That pile of sand will never become a person.  Never.  It is not going to work to convince that pile of sand to become a person instead.  

So it is with trying to convince most people to understand things they don’t want to understand—they are really acting that way because they cannot understand certain things.  They more than want—they need—to believe things that are not factually true.  Like talking to a pile of sand, they are not built to understand certain things.  It is a futile task to explain to someone that a certain thing destabilizes or melts at a certain temperature.  A waste, because they are not just refusing to look through that telescope, they are incapable of getting that those planets are not going around the Earth.  Trying to get them to reconcile what it means if certain things had to be certain ways is like trying to explain to a pile of sand how much better it is to be a person than to be sand.  

The sand will not change into a person, no matter how good your arguments, how detailed your explanations, etc. are.  It is not because you are wrong, nor even because you have not explained in a detailed enough or clever enough fashion how being a human can be way better than being a pile of sand.  Some things—some minds; some people—just are not able to process some things.  

This is why universalism is so popular again and again.  Many people need it—a true need—and like when someone goes piss in the only water they’ll have for a few days, they don’t like that.  Don’t like it at all, but get them thirsty enough—no other fluids for seven days—and they will drink that water.  Even though someone has pissed/peed in there.  Water is a genuine need.  

Universalism is the same way for some people—a need.  They often don’t know it in words, but they know that they need stories of universalism.  So when they sense that stories of universalism are threatened, they have a defensive reaction.  They can’t help it.  It is true that bad people are just telling them everyone is really the same so we have to spend money—or some other lie—in order to calm them down and make them not resist being robbed.  However, they need that universalist story so bad that they will get mad when they can tell that the story is threatened.  

Consider the information that people from low-income ZIP codes and people from high-income ZIP codes get IQ-test scores based not on the ZIP code in which they live but on the genetic group (“race”) to which they belong.  This is a fact that destroys the Christian (universalist; that's about what Jesus was talking) argument of environmentalism.  Because of that, some people know that they have to ignore that even though they don’t have the strength to know more consciously why it is an unwanted fact.  

Endeavoring to convince the sand to be a person instead is inevitably going to fail.  Sand is sand.  It is so with decay.  Like sand cannot figure out how to stand up and walk, it cannot even stare blankly at you as you explain to it that the forgotten hot dog will not look the same after 1000 years of resting on that pile of sand.  Just like trying to get sand to give you a loan, trying to get a person without the proper mind to comprehend things they cannot comprehend is not going to happen.  (Jesina Christ tries to convince Jesusians and Bangists that various rabbi-based egalitarian stories aren't true as a hobby, not because success is expected.  It's like kicking at this branch one sees while walking along the beach.  Sure, it'd be nice if that branch and some of the sand under it suddenly became a beautiful woman, but in all likelihood that's not going to happen.  Don't get frustrated that your arguments don't work: you're not dealing with someone who can process that brains designed in a certain way can't possibly..., that steel frames can't possibly..., etc.  The implications of both of those things would shatter worldviews about how genetics are arranged to provide for how bodies are built, how groups have interests and universalism/egalitarianism is nonsense, and so forth.  Some people need that, and this is the Christian era [sic; Era].)  

This example can help you understand the way that you cannot successfully make arguments to certain people.  They cannot believe that certain things can be certain ways.  Trying to change their minds is like trying to explain to part of the beach that it is better to be human than to be sand.