About 8 or 9 years ago, I was engaged in an internet debate with a male redditor about male privilege. He had some very ignorant takes on the subject, which I countered with my own arguments. I was actually managing to make decent progress towards changing his mind, until I decided to post his shit-takes on one of the SRS subreddits. As redditors tend to do, he looked through my post history, and found my post mocking him. He then told me that I was starting to get through to him, until he saw my post mocking him, and he then decided not to listen to me anymore. I don't remember his exact words, but the point he made was that it wasn't fair to mock someone who was attempting to engage with me in good faith.

At the time, I rejected his criticism, but now I agree with it. Back then, I was still stuck in the "ruthless struggle and merciless blows" mindset, as Mao put it. I was more concerned with "owning" reactionaries than I was with meeting them where they were, and trying to win them over. Years of practical experience have taught me quite a bit about the human condition. Now I can see that, while it may be frustrating, changing minds is a slow and tricky business. Most of us didn't start with correct ideas; our minds changed slowly, as we were exposed to alternate views. We accepted them, when we were ready to, bit by bit.

Though it may be frustrating, we must take this all-too-human variable into account. It is good to be aware of it in our own thinking, and attempt to counteract it, as far as is possible and practicable. But we cannot expect everyone else to be a perfectly logical automata. If we want to be effective in changing people's minds, we have to be patient with them; determine where they stand, and give them gentle nudges in the right direction. Everyone has to start somewhere, and belittling someone just because they aren't as far along as we want them to be generally tends to be counterproductive.

Now that I have accepted the "unity-struggle-unity" mindset, I can see that their criticism was indeed correct. My criticism to them would be that, even though I was unprincipled in my approach, my arguments were still correct, and it would've been best if they could have examined them without allowing their emotional response to override their cognition. But as I said, although we should all strive to be as close to perfectly logical automata as we can be, we can't expect the average person to be that, and we have to take that into account.

Feel free to share times when someone correctly criticized you but you weren't ready to hear it in the comments, if you feel comfortable sharing.