Can Irrational people Be Persuaded with Rationality?

[Angrboda]

Personally I have had no luck talking rationality to irrational people. I have found it to be the same as believing that your words of English will be understood of someone who knows only Mandarin- it will just be frustrating for both parties, since the language of reason is so far beyond non reason.

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
― Confucius, The Analects

If someone clearly is not responding to reason and evidence, they are simply talking in emotional defence, so I think the best course of action is to ask them questions about what they are feeling when their belief in God or Government or whatever it is is being questioned. How was there childhood? Were they punished for rational thinking and questioning 'authority' figures? If so, it's probably no secret why they would be so defensive now, since rational thinking was always associated with parental hostility or beatings or being attacked by peers. That fight or flight mechanism comes when you ask them about the morality of their religion or government or whatever irrational belief they hold.

I find that playing armchair psychologist in addition to usually being a means to satisfy your irrational needs rather than to understand theirs, usually results in increased emotion, intransigence and unwillingness to consider what you have to say. (I had a male friend in college who had the hots for one of my mates. She tended to get anxious in response to his advances, as he was rather forward, and she was rather uninterested. One night he confided in me that he suspected that the reason for, what to him, was an odd reaction, was that she had probably been raped sometime in her past. Now, at the time, I did in fact know that she had been raped, but of course I could say nothing. However, even though his theory had some limited foundation in reality, it was fundamentally self-serving, and its purpose was to give him a sense of control over the situation which he at that time lacked. His speculations, even though true, were not necessarily the reason for the nature of the interaction between the two of them. A few years later she wed another friend of mine, which, in some sense, puts to rest the viability of his theory that a prior traumatic sexual violation explained his difficulty in forming a strong emotional and physically intimate relationship with her.)

The fact is, most people lack both the competence and knowledge to meaningfully make inferences about what one should expect of another's behavior from limited personal history.