Expanding empathy and breaking political binaries, ft. Anand Giridharadas
How do we stay with the art of persuasion?
“This kind of ‘win-win’ social change is dangerous not just because it obscures how little is changing, but also because plutocrats use this fake change as a smokescreen to distract us from their continued plunder.”
For Green Dreamer’s 400th episode, we welcome Anand Giridharadas, a writer and journalist whose books include The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, Anand has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The Ink.
Spanning themes of philanthropy, political change, and social media, Anand unsettles the assumptions of “win-win” social change. How does the rise of elite philanthropy and plutocratic “do-gooding” coincide with the hoarding of power? We look at how in an age of bifurcated American politics, many people fighting for social change face burnout or have given up.
Accordingly, Anand calls for the need to stay with the art of persuasion and simultaneous calling-in and calling-out—digging deeper into the political spectrum rather than simplifying people’s complex humanity into binaries.
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“When it comes to political life, these platforms have given a lot of people an illusion of being civic that you feel like spending 45 minutes on Twitter is doing politics when it's doing anti-politics. It's just driving people further away from each other, fomenting a kind of relationship with one another that makes it impossible to have a coalition and mind-changing alliances and things like this.” – Anand Giridharadas
Anand comes full circle with…
A recommendation: “I learned to go back to the basics. I mean, I learned so much about the form of writing that I came to follow, these kinds of books that look at the way people are living amid the big forces of our time through personal stories of people grappling with them. And I learned a lot of that from the writings of V.S. Naipaul, specifically the travel writing of V.S. Naipaul.”
And a grounding reminder: “I live in, as so many of us do, a very fast-paced, intense world… And I think it's very possible to live life in overdrive…
I grew up in a house where we would not start eating dinner if music had not been put on the stereo to accompany our dinner. Moments mattered. Creating moments mattered, and having time to connect mattered. And I try to pass that on to my family now.”
What inspirations or curiosities are still lingering with you from this episode?
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