How “Revisionist History” Changes Minds

I discovered Malcolm Gladwell in college because the boy I had a crush on said his favorite book was "Outliers." Curiously, I didn't rush out and pick up that book. Being a literature major, I was wolfing down about a thousand pages of text a week, varying widely on the scales of fictionalized and interesting.

What I did have time for was podcasts.

When my head hurt from starting at a screen so much that my optometrist told me my eyes went from better than average to "if I drive without my glasses I'm definitely a health risk," I listened to podcasts. My brain, in that inexhaustible way of a person who loves t to learn and finds herself living in a place entirely devoted to the concept of education, was not tried. Only my eyes. So I listened. I listened to the back catalog of episodes of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast “Revisionist History.” It was only a couple seasons at that point, and after listening, I felt a little smarter.

Actually, I wouldn't shut up about what I had learned to anyone who would listen, and a few people who wouldn’t. I might even have had a bit of a crush on Malcolm Gladwell in that way as a young woman raised in a society that teaches her to relate herself to the world through romantic relationships with men interprets the heady and intoxicating sensation of being educated.

But it was falling in love.

It was falling in love with ideas, with the pursuit of knowledge, with the inexhaustible variety of humanity. It was falling in love with style and vocabulary, with chutzpah and dogged pursuit. It was, for a girl who grew up in a Christian school that always treated her unquenchable thirst for knowledge as something a little bit dangerous, validation.

So how does Revisionist History change minds?

2016 was the first election in which I could vote. I was thrilled. The idea of participating in democracy is the kind of thing that makes my heart race and my eyes fill with stars. I believed so hard back then--in some ways I still do, though it's much grayer now--in government and democracy and even capitalism. Coming from the background I come from, knowing the "facts" as I knew them, I voted for Donald Trump. I remember checking the box (I voted by absentee ballot as I went to college out of state) and thinking, "I can't believe that the first time I vote, I have to vote for this clown." But he was, in my estimation, the lesser of two evils.

I have trouble admitting I'm wrong. It's a pride thing, to be sure, but the pride is in that I believe I have done the homework, and that my judgement is sound. There are a lot of things I thought as a younger person that were wrong because I didn't access the information I needed to come to the right conclusion. It's hard to know what you don't know, right? But still, I like to believe I made the best choice based on the evidence I had and the criteria I set up.

I'll fast forward to when I was living in a studio house in the middle of nowhere in my first year as a teacher in an incredibly tough environment. I had moved away from family and friends in order to spend some time and a lot of energy on the kids who needed me most. It was during that time, as I relistened to the first three seasons of Revisionist History in preparation for the fourth to come out, that a switch went off in my brain.

That brings me to "General Chapman's Last Stand," an episode of Revisionist History that well and truly changed my mind. Owing to being a person who views herself primarily as her mind, it changed me pretty thoroughly too. One part in particular, the recording of a session at an immigration court, changed me.

Not long after I listened to that episode, I was standing in my mother's living room, on a stepstool to hang a world map for her. A bit ironic, or maybe just poignant, considering the topic.

"I listened to a recording where my government sent a lawyer to argue that human beings held by them were not owed enough space to lie down, the lights off for them to sleep. That is what my government is doing. No, I'm not voting for him."

Somehow politics had come up. Trump had come up. And I was seething. How had I gone from using all the tools I had to somehow try and justify the Trump administration's choices to being so vehemently against it? Empathy.

I listened to an episode of Revisionist History that gave me the push I needed to remember what a government is for: the people. Honestly, I'm pretty disappointed by politics in general. It all feels like varying degrees of bad to dismal to thoroughly terrifying.

But what I'm not disappointed in is the reason behind my reasoning.

I have come to the conclusion that when I need to make a choice, if I put empathy as my first filter, if I ask first how it will affect those around me, then at least I can count on the motives behind the choice. I might make a bad decision at any moment. I am fallible, flawed, with massive blindspots and privileges I have hardly begun to mine. But if I choose empathy first, I know I am at least trying my best.

Through this podcast, I hadn't just leaned something, I had become something. I had become someone who was not satisfied with the simple answer, who questioned what had always been done. Who was willing to believe that the next big idea might someday come from her. I became a better person, more empathetic, and stronger in that empathy. In understanding people, society, History, bias, I understood myself more.

I realize now, as I talk about the feelings I had about Malcolm, about voting, about learning, they’re all sensations of falling in love. In the end, I think am in love with loving things; with loving people who love things, with anything that makes people passionate. And I think that's why Revisionist History speaks to me so much. I know that along the way, Malcolm Gladwell has discovered things he never thought would interest him. I'd wager there were things he explored that in fact didn't capture him at all, at least at first, but he was deeply interested in the people who were interested in those things.

In a time when we're wondering desperately how to change minds, I give you my personal philosophy and Revisionist History. The answer is empathy. It's always empathy. When we make decisions, all we have is the information at hand and the filter we run it through. Since we don’t know what we don’t know, we can do our best to intake the necessary information, but we’ll always miss something. The biggest difference, at least for me, is the filter. Now, my filter is always empathy, and that’s due to Revisionist History.

So thank you, Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you for changing me, for showing me a better way to live my life.

I make a lot of recommendations. I recommend books and shows and shoes and ice cream. But I have never made a recommendation so seriously, so honestly, as I recommend Revisionist History. I have taken to relistening to every episode once a year; I call them my human lessons. It's reminding myself that empathy is the answer.

So go listen to Revisionist History. It's incredibly fun (somehow I got all the way to here without mentioning that), and, if you let it, I genuinely believe it will change your life. It will change you. It did changed me.