How to Change Your Mind

A short essay on the strange science of second thoughts, and the moral courage it takes to have them—especially in Canada, right now

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“To doubt one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. Don't defend past actions; what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Don't be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools.”
— Hyman G. Rickover

It’s hard to imagine today. Two weeks out from the election, the meme battles would have us believe Canada is a nation deeply divided by ideology and entrenched along party lines with unwavering loyalty to tried and trusted leaders.

But that’s not true at all.

A few months ago, Canadians changed their minds.

Quietly. Rapidly. Almost without explanation.

What happened?

Polls flipped. Certainties crumbled. A feeling, not quite hope, but something adjacent. Possibility. A realignment of tone, if not yet policy.

Facts didn’t change. History didn’t change. The government didn’t change. The thing we all want didn’t change. The arguments, the media, the memes, the sides — none of that changed. Not a single new policy was announced.

But the options changed. The choices changed, and so did Canada.

It happened over the course of a couple eventful days.

So we know we can change our minds, individually and as a country.

And yet now, with an election looming, something else has happened: a hardening. Minds have closed. Opinions have calcified. We’ve slipped from thinking into meme warfare.

Which raises a very old question that matters more than ever now:

What does it take to change your mind?

Two weeks until the election, and most people would say they’ve made up their minds.

But have they, really?

The question is not "Have you decided?"
The better question is "What would make you change your mind?"

That’s harder to say. Unsettling. But profoundly important.

Most voters, two weeks out from an election, would tell you they’ve made up their minds.
But what they really mean is: they’ve stopped thinking about it.

Because we don’t admire people who change their minds. We call them weak, flaky, disloyal. We have built whole political campaigns on the attack word flip-flopper. We’d rather a man march toward a cliff with conviction than pause and ask for directions.

In Nova Scotia today we have a premier — untethered from any ideology except the practical business of building a better Nova Scotia — who has changed his mind on some really important issues. Why? He took a stand, for a reason, and then the people, of whom he sees himself as a representative as much as a leader, spoke out and said they wanted to go in a different direction. And he did.

How Tim Houston gets treated for this in the polls, legacy media, in the social media, and by history, I note are very different things. In particular, I’ll call out the environmental movement who, when he listens to them, explains the situation, and tries to compromise or accomodate them, seem doublly enraged from when he wasn’t governing to suit them. Clearly, it’s complicated.

But what if Rickover was right? What if doubt isn’t dysfunction but a feature of a civilized mind? What if being open to change is not only rational—but noble?

The Illusion of Consistency

If there’s one trait we love to see in public life, it’s consistency. Politicians are rewarded for it, pundits demand it, and voters pretend to prize it above all else. But under scrutiny, consistency becomes a strange and fragile virtue.

Why? Because most of what we call "consistency" isn’t really about principle. It’s about performance.

Consistency in politics is often little more than rhetorical inertia—a refusal to grow masked as strength. We like our leaders to “stay the course,” even if that course was plotted on a map that no longer matches the terrain. We scorn the ones who evolve, even when the world demands it. The truth is: being consistent is easy. What’s hard is being right when the facts have changed.

Rickover’s warning—“Don’t be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools”—isn’t an attack on integrity. It’s a plea for intellectual and ideological humility. He understood what most of us would rather not admit: that humans are unreliable narrators of their own beliefs. The idea that we can—or should—lock in a position for life is not strength. It’s stubbornness, suspicion, and siloed identity politics dressed up along party lines.

And yet, the illusion persists.

Because once we make a choice—especially a public one—we begin to construct a scaffolding around it. Social cues, identity markers, confirmation bias, tribal loyalty. We don’t just believe things. We become them.

In the movie Doubt, Sister Aloysius is a master of moral conviction—but a poor arguer.

She doesn't listen to counterpoints, doesn't ask clarifying questions, and never reveals what evidence could change her mind.

Her strength is clarity, but her flaw is certainty without curiosity—and that’s where real argument dies.

Father Flynn wants nuance. He speaks of doubt as a bond between people—but he hides behind vagueness and never lays out his full case.

He avoids direct conflict, which makes him hard to pin down—and even harder to trust. He’s no more open than Sister Aloysius.

In real arguments, ambiguity can be as dangerous as dogma.

Politics and the Marketplace of Commitment

Modern politics isn’t a battle of ideas. It’s a battle of commitments. And like any marketplace, it runs on certainty — brand loyalty.

Campaigns don’t try to change your mind. They try to lock it in.

From the moment an election cycle begins, you're not treated like a thinking citizen. You’re treated like a customer who’s already halfway to the cash register. Targeted ads, curated feeds, door-knock scripts—all designed not to persuade you, but to confirm you. To congratulate your beliefs before you’ve even said them out loud. And to walk away if you disagree.

Why? Because it works. Political strategists have known for decades what behavioral economists and Silicon Valley engineers now call first principles: people don’t like friction. Once we’ve made a decision—especially one that connects to our identity—we build little fortresses around it. We resist new evidence. We reject nuance and complexity. We follow the dopamine.

We also hate losing. And changing your mind feels, weirdly, like losing.

So political parties sell certainty. They manufacture urgency. They flood the zone with binary choices, forcing you to adopt a side even when your heart says, not quite either one. Over time, we don’t just support a candidate—we inherit their enemies. We absorb their vocabulary. We mirror their outrage. And then we call it conviction.

This is why minds so rarely change. Not because the facts haven’t shifted, but because the cost of reconsidering feels too high. Change becomes betrayal. Flexibility becomes weakness. Nuance becomes risk. And complexity… unthinkable.

The irony, of course, is that everyone has changed their mind about something. A policy. A war. A leader they once loved. We just don’t like to admit it. Because the political marketplace has no aisle for “Changed My Mind, Still Thinking.”

Remember Justin Trudeau’s sunny ways? We wanted a leader that looked like tomorrow. Filled with hope. Grounded in the best of our past. Fun, family, and friendly. It wasn’t Justin Trudeau who changed. It was us. We decided we wanted to speak to the manager. The Boss. And he, was decidedly not the boss. And oh my goodness, people got cross.

So we changed our minds.

You know what doesn’t change people’s minds? Memes, micdrops, debate, shame, winning, and facts delivered like fastballs. Those don’t work. They’re too aggressive. Too performative. Minds don’t change when they’re under siege. They change when the walls come down—and something new is allowed in.

Which means the most important condition for changing your mind… is being willing to. Under what conditions do you open yourself up to change your mind?

Are You On Drugs?

Michael Pollan’s fascinating book How to Change Your Mind wasn’t written about politics—it was about psychedelics. But its deeper point is about plasticity: that our thoughts, and the identities we build around them, aren’t fixed. They’re more like clay than stone.

Pollan describes the Default Mode Network—the brain’s autopilot—that helps us move through life efficiently, but also locks us into habits, assumptions, and grooves of thought. Breaking that pattern takes more than facts. It takes experience. Reflection. And above all, openness.

In the future, as in the past, we may use drugs to create that openness.

RELATED: My experiences with drugs and music

Most political strategy assumes that minds don’t change. Not really. So campaigns don’t aim to persuade. They aim to confirm. They feed your identity, not your intellect. They reward consistency, not curiosity.

But there’s a deeper danger here.

Dr. Dan Cohn is an expert arguer. But he noticed something. The more expert he becomes at arguing, the more he loses.

He asks, Why do we argue? To out-reason our opponents, prove them wrong, and, most of all, to win! ... Right? He shows how our most common form of argument -- a war in which one person must win and the other must lose -- misses out on the real benefits of engaging in active disagreement.

The truth is we FIGHT to win. We argue to win over. And that can only be done under increasingly rare conditions. Plus, it’s not taught in school, can’t just be picked up along the way, and we’re truly terrible at it.

That said, it’s not hard to learn how to argue. People have known and taught other how to argue for thousands of years. It used to be called “school.” Now school serves a different purpose but… YOU TUBE… You can improve your arguing skills by 80% with three basic moves:

Here are 3 basic, essential steps to learn how to argue—not just to win, but to be clear, persuasive, and maybe even change a mind:

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1. Ask: “What would change your mind?”

If the answer is “nothing”—you’re not in an argument. You’re in a performance.
Real arguments require openness, even just a crack.

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2. Separate the person from the point.

Disagree with the idea, not the identity.
Attack the argument, not the arguer. If they can do the same, you’re both already ahead.

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3. Steelman before you strike

Before you disagree, state the other person’s position better than they did.
It shows you understand, and it forces clarity on both sides.

Here’s my friend and world deabte champion, Bo Seo explaining the problem with arguing. He’s also a debate coach at Harvard. Bo believes our public conversations are in crisis. To him, our arguing skills have collectively atrophied over recent decades, resulting in bad arguments that have caused many people to lose faith in the idea that productive disagreements are even possible.

I’m not a professional arguer like Bo or Dr. Dan. But it is a central part of my job in the world of selling ideas. I've learned step one above helps avoid about 80% of arguments and objections. Simply, ask the other person if there are any conditions under which they'd change their mind. People will surprisingly often answer NO, or worse, that there are no conditions, none, that I could ever say (which means it's about me).

When people say there are no conditions under which they’d change their mind, they’ve shared a lot with you. Listen carefully when they say it. They thereby reveal something important - we are not in and can not have a rational argument because they've openly rejected the idea of changing their mind. They are closed.

This is not nearly as unreasonable as it may seem at first to logic lovers. Surprisingly, little of what we think, and what matters to us, is rational - open to logical proof. And we’re OK with that most of the time.

My favourite colour is orange - I think, in splashes, it just pops with everything and makes the day a little brighter. Not once in my life has anyone ever argued that point with me. Many just share their favourite colour. Parallel play. We listen a little to their reasons. It’s not a trivial concern. We often can see favourite colours in their wardrobe or the colour of their house, room, or car. But then off we go. Though people feel astonishingly strongly about colour, I have never in my life heard an argument or debate break out around disputing someone’s favorite colours.

And yet, make that orange for NDP, and Red for Liberal, Blue for CPC, and Green for, well, Green, and you have arguments that destroy families, friendships, and bring whole countries to the brink.

My wife Amanda is a mental health professional who spent years in Child Protection Services. She has shared with me that the main thing families argue about is arguing. No matter what the trigger, it’s how we argue that seems flawed and broken. Families are the original arena where human beings test boundaries, assert identities, and learn the language of disagreement—hopefully with love as the ground note. So how, when, and why they argue is counterintuitively the subject of a lot of disagreement.

“Are there any conditions under which you’d change your mind?”

What if the rarest and most needed act in Canadian political life right now isn’t to hold the line—but to consider, with sincerity, that you might be wrong?

That’s not a flip-flop. That’s called being rational.

So before you vote—or even speak again—especially to try and convince someone else to change their mind with your meme or mic drop headline, try the test:

Under what possible conditions would I change my mind?

And if there are none—why not?

Because if we can’t answer that honestly, then we’re not citizens. We sure aren’t good arguers. And we are unlikely to sway anyone’s ideas about anything.

We’re consumers of prepackaged belief. And that’s not democracy.

That’s just branding.