How do you get anyone to change their mind?
Behavioural specialists will tell you there are three ways – presentation of irrefutable facts; opinion by someone who is seen to be objective and a truth speaker; peer group pressure.
However, success is not guaranteed, and you can’t always count on that someone actually listening or paying attention. You need to reach their gut – that undefinable area of the mind where we keep all our patterns, prejudices, beliefs, hope and fears. And you need to kick this gut into considering something different, and out of homeostasis.
Beliefs form attitudes, attitudes form behaviors, behaviors form our outward observable connections with the world. But the question remains – how do you change everyone’s beliefs at the same time?
Our home grown terrorists decided to create world-wide conditions identical to those experienced in the worst refugee camps, by taking away all the modern technology the world had come to rely on.
No oil, gas or coal. No internet, computers, or electronic devices with MAC chips. No nuclear weapons or power stations. And to cap their ambitions, they directly attacked the Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish religions, and the military academy at West Point. Then they shot down the International Space Station.
All this unfolded over two weeks, and left the world reeling.
The panic that ensued created the largest migration of people ever experience as families headed for where they thought they could get food, water, shelter, and maybe work. And while this massive disruption was festering, the terrorists managed to move thousands of refugee children out of the camps, and into purpose made high technology homes with volunteer parents. The draw card being the provision of power, shelter, work, and a sustainable environment. And hope.
Now, the question that has been asked of me is how can a fictional story change beliefs?
First, you have to get someone to read the story, then have something in the story that resonates with them, to open their ‘guts’ to new or different information. In a sense, you have to allow them to self-educate during the process of enjoying the story arc.
Fact – one child under the age of ten years dies in a refugee camp every eight minutes.
Fact – the cause of refugee camps is internecine warfare, politics, greed, the quest for power and resources, and has been going on for centuries.
We probably can’t stop that from happening – look at the current conflict between the Ukraine and Russia – over 2 million ‘new’ refugees have been created so far and counting in just the past year.
So the story arc I have chosen is remove young girls from the camps, place them in homes, and look to the future as their hope and the technology – in the form or sustainable power generation, biofuel, and other technology wonders the terrorists introduce offer a better, sustainable future.
It should be mentioned that the family unit is core to this story arc, and should resonate with every person that reads the books.
We may not change beliefs, but we will raise awareness, and perhaps cause questions to be asked that move the issue to the front and center of our modern existence.
How do we stop the seemingly endless wars around the planet that fill these refugee camps?
How can we lower the number of children dying in the camps.