Evangelism vs. Cultural Activism

An Ask a Manager reader wants to shut down an employee who is annoying coworkers by constantly discussing the Keto diet. I found Alison Green's answer valuable both for helping me understand why that kind of behavior annoys me so much, and causing me to consider how I can avoid doing the same kind of thing myself in the future.

Alison replies in part:

If Casey were this obsessed with evangelizing for something unrelated to diet and health -- like, I don't know, the Dallas Cowboys or Daylight Savings -- it could still reach a point where you'd need to rein it in, but it being about diet and health gives it an extra layer of obnoxiousness and adds additional urgency for you to tell them to cut it out.

Constant Daylight Savings evangelism would be annoying too (as well as pretty weird) but at least it wouldn't involve judging other people's diets and pushing unsolicited health advice. It would be irritating and boring, but it wouldn't cross boundaries in the same way. [bold added]

This is a great distinction, and I love how the humorous -- and neutral! -- phrase Daylight Savings evangelism makes the knowledge so retrievable by being so memorable.

To make it a little bit more generalized, it's worth taking a moment to unpack why the behavior in question crosses boundaries.

For the sake of argument, assume that this diet (or kind of diet) is indeed what we should be doing. Even so, in today's context, any audience will have (1) heard the same thing asserted about countless other diets; (2) be happy enough with their current well-being to not see a need to make learning/switching a priority over other more urgent matters; (3) have legitimate doubts about the speaker's claims; (4) considered the information already and made up their own minds one way or the other; or (5) have psychological issues with the subject matter and need space and time to even become receptive to thinking about it.

I'm probably missing a few possibilities that aren't rank evasion here.

On top of all of that, our culture is saturated with the influence of Christianity -- which (1) commands its followers to do things (like win converts), (2) preaches that other-centered ethics of altruism (often, among other things, causing people to not see moral questions as personally urgent or worthy of practical consideration), and (3) emphasizes profession of faith, verbally and non-verbally. (Why this somehow doesn't get called out as virtue signaling is a good question.) This influence predisposes anyone being advised on how to live a better life to feel judged and bossed around, for starters.

Building a better culture is not as simple as immersing people in water or haranguing them (especially with the truth) non-stop. Being more discriminating about when and how to share philosophical knowledge is vital to the enterprise.

After learning the truth, respecting the minds of others is high on the list of things to get right when one wants to improve the culture by spreading it.

-- CAV