When editing an Insight: Politics article, Do you feel in control? written by Nathan Smith, the penny dropped for me when he explained about “frame control”.
Frame control is a game every 7-year-old knows how to play. One day they hold up a pen and tell their parent that it is actually a banana. The parent would say, “No, that’s a pen,” to which the child will respond: “Silly, can’t you see this is a banana?” and run away giggling, impressed how they could force an adult to temporarily adopt a child’s frame and engage with their reasoning in the first place.
Too many times in life we engage in debates with people who are holding up a pen and telling us it is a banana. They frame the argument and we foolishly engage with them despite the fact that the frame is completely nonsensical.
Would you engage in a debate with someone who told you that the sky is green? Would you waste time constructing an argument to prove that it is blue? You wouldn’t would you but that is exactly what most of us do when people look us in the eye and tell us equally ludicrous things.
Why on earth are we debating the ludicrous frame that men are women for example. Would we debate claims that men are rocks or that men are shagpile carpet? We need to leave the sandpits that these lunatics are playing in.
We are told that democracy is co-governance. Why on earth are we even engaging in a debate about it? We all know what democracy is and what equality is. Co-governance is neither. Those pushing it are dangerous extremists and what they are trying to do needs to be stopped, not debated.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but your desire to help these people is misguided. If there is one group that will never change, it is the left. They have done the same dumb stuff that makes zero sense for thousands of years. […] You have a higher chance of turning a stone into water by using your mind than you do of convincing the political left to stop being crazy.
We need to stop engaging with these lunatics. Why on earth would you want to waste your time trying to convince someone that the sky is not green or that their pen is not a banana, that a man is not a woman or that making a non-Maori’s vote worth less than a Maori’s vote is equality?
We need to stop them, not talk to them. By entering their sandpit and playing by their rules, inside their frame, we are feeding their delusion.
Just stop it.
