Once you have given up flying, the next question is if, why and how to persuade others to give up flying as well. In this post I will focus on the persuasion of your social network (your friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances). Influencing strangers will be the topic of another post.
Why you should persuade others to give up flying
The least obvious reason for trying to get others to give up flying is to keep yourself honest. Maybe you are wrong about giving up flying. When you seek to persuade others you open the door to them persuading you. Persuading others of your position will provide a useful dose of critical resistance to your position. This is a vital part of advocacy: thinking through whether you are actually pushing a good idea. If not you risk harming rather than helping the world. The risk of getting this wrong actually grows over time. The longer you advocate a cause, the greater the risk becomes that you will be unwilling or emotionally unable to admit that you were wrong about it. You should be very vigilant about this risk and the best way to deal with it is to speak to people you disagree with about it as often as possible. Conveniently, speaking to people you disagree with is also one of the most important things you can do if you are in fact right about the issue.
The second and most obvious reason for advocacy though is that we need other people to give up flying to slow and beat climate change. As an individual there are only so many flights one person cannot take and then you personally are at zero flights. There are about four billion flights being taken a year and we need every single person on those flights to join us, that is, to get to zero flights.
Why you in particular should be an advocate
While you are very useful in the broader discussions that happen between strangers, you are absolutely critical in getting your social network to give up flying. You need to be an advocate of giving up flying in your social network because the people inside your social network, such as you, have an ability to influence the others inside the network, that outsiders (the government, activists and commentators) can never have. Outsiders can map out the issues but only those inside the social network, people’s actual living friends and family, can make the issue ‘real’. To demonstrate this principle in a non-political setting, consider how many advertisements we get for things and yet still many of us only take up a new product after a friend does.
Imagine everyone in the world divided up into little social networks of a few hundred friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances. Wherever someone in that social network is flying, we need someone else in that network to give up flying to demonstrate to the former that giving up flying is possible. Your actions inside that social network of family and friends are working in combination with the external activists and commentators but both are essential. You need to add that spark of credibility and reality to those famous activists and commentators.
Get ready though, it can be very tough. A lot of people object to bringing political issues into social settings and you can expect a lot of pushback. You may find it much easier to discuss these issues with complete strangers than within your social network. In fact the very reason you can be so persuasive to your social network is because of the pressure on you to not bring politics into social settings. But you really have to do so. The pushback you get arises from the same phenomenon that will make your advocacy within your social network so effective: the expectation that politics only enters social settings when the issue is very serious. When you cringe and worry about bringing up not flying in a social setting just remember that no politician, activist or commentator can bring the credibility to this issue within your social network that you can.
How to persuade others to stop flying – passive measures
The mere act of giving up flying is itself an act of persuasion. Provided your friends and family actually know you have given up flying, you will be persuasive even without saying anything further. Generally, our actions are more influential than our words. This is because our actions actually have a ‘cost’ whereas talk is cheap. When you talk about climate change, some people might think you are just wanting the kudos of being ethical and well informed without actually caring, that you’re fake. But when you act on climate change, you demonstrate that climate change is an issue so serious that you are willing to incur costs for it.
One of the most persuasive things you can do is to not only not fly, but to live a cool life without flying. Look for ways to achieve the fun and personal growth you used to get from travel from other ways now that you will not be travelling. That will demonstrate to other people that giving up flying will not be the end of the world.
How you live a cool life without flying is different for each person. Just one example of a cool life without emissions from my own life is as follows – but bear with me as it probably will seem a bit strange. For years I have been meaning to publish regularly on my blog but have not got around to doing it mainly through procrastination and laziness. Now that I am not flying I have so much more motivation to get off my rear and publish every week. Publishing my blog is not a substitute for travel but the feeling of satisfaction I get is something wonderful in my week. I am more disciplined and motivated to do so now knowing that I will not be flying. Why? Because in previous years the ‘wonderful’ thing in my life was international travel. Now though, I know that I won’t be having those cool trips so have to find wonderful here at home. The blog does not give me the same experiences and emotions I would get from travel but it does give me something wonderful and special. Maybe for you your nervousness about being a beginner as an adult has stopped you from trying some new hobby (surfing or dancing for example). If you are no longer travelling you might be able to push through that nervousness and get the specialness and wonder from surfing or dancing that you used to get from international travel. The possibilities are endless.
If you give up flying and live a cool life and your friends know that it is a life without flying that is an enormous contribution. If the thought of more active advocacy turns you off so much that you think it might actually damage your resolve to not fly any more, don’t do it. Better to make a small permanent change than a grand start followed by a reversal. If you announce you are giving up flying and then change your mind you will damage the cause within your social network. Just as only people inside the social network can demonstrate how real the issue is, any demonstration by you that the cause is unrealistic will be very real to your family, friends and acquaintances. If you think you can give up flying and actively advocate the issue, read on. In fact, you might want to read on anyway because it is often very difficult to tell people about not flying without ending up advocating the cause in answering their many questions. Some general observations on advocacy are as follows.
Active measures to persuade others to give up flying
Try to make the experience pleasant. Try to make the experience for the other person more like buying a new product rather than getting a lecture. Although you must not ever lie about climate change and the following analogy is pretty limited: you can, just as a bit of a shorthand, try to imagine yourself more as a salesperson than a lawyer or teacher. You don’t want to force people to not fly, you want them to want to not fly.
When somebody changes their mind, it is not just an analytical process, it is also a psychological process. People need to have a set of ideas that makes sense in a conceptual way but they also need to have the psychological ‘space’ to change their mind. While we would all like to imagine that we are driven mostly by the ideas, in fact we are driven very much by things like how our ideas will make people like us or not. That is, the process of changing our minds can be much more psychological than analytical. Very much so in most cases. For this reason, when getting people to change their minds about flying, we need to base our approach as much on psychology as on analysis.
Keeping the discussion on ideas rather than people will give psychological space to people to change their minds. Updating our ideas is less threatening than admitting another person was right. Even when you are talking about ‘ideas’, the psyche, the tribe, people’s pride, vanities and ego are all the loud but silent subtext to the ideas. Therefore, try as much as possible to not be adversarial. Speak calmly, never shout, don’t sigh and moan about disagreements and in all ways try to strip out the emotional and tribal (pride, strength, posturing) out of the moment.
The smaller the audience is the more likely people are to change their minds. For some people with massive egos, they will not care less about being seen to change their mind mid-conversation. However, most people have various foibles and neuroses and will to various extents, not like to ‘come second’ to an idea. That is, they feel that when somebody changes their mind on something, they are ‘losing’ and that person is ‘winning’ and that this is unpleasant. Therefore, the bigger the audience listening to a conversation, the more important it is to have the argument centre on ideas rather than the theatre of ‘who won’.
Map the issues out but do not be belligerent and do not demand people make some public statement or acknowledgment that they have changed their mind as this will make the discussion about people rather than ideas. Do not even press them for an answer or position. Lay out the argument, make sure they are aware that you have already given up flying (a very strong and ‘real’ argument) but then drop the issue. This will allow people space to later change their mind later and in your absence. Conversely, if you press someone for an answer, they may be driven by pride to stick to their guns. If somebody asks to change the subject, let them.
Do not try to ‘win’ the argument straight away and do not be disillusioned if you are not immediately successful in changing minds. Not only can it take a long time but it can require numerous different approaches. Your efforts at advocacy are just one instance in which people will be exposed to these ideas. You are working, even unknowingly, with other advocates and commentators. You may have a conversation that completely ‘fails’ to win a friend over to giving up flying. What you may not see though, is that your conversation has almost won them over and they are now in a perfect frame of mind for something they see tomorrow to change their mind. Rather than ‘winning’ people over, just aim to plant the seed by letting them know you have given up flying. If there is no discussion about it, no problem. Just planting that seed is useful.
Regularly bring the conversation back to the benefits of giving up flying (pushing back climate change and delaying and hopefully stopping the floods, droughts and wars that will come with climate change). Do not deny or contest the idea that giving up flying will be bad, it will be bad if you view it in isolation. Instead, explain that that sacrifice of giving up flying is part of a bigger picture and longer story of a safer and more comfortable world.
And that is what it is all about, a safer and more comfortable world with fewer floods, droughts and wars.