Convincing People

Can you really convince anyone of anything in the sense of changing their mind? I remember reading about a famous libertarian, not a politician, maybe a business guy, who took acid back when acid was new and the revelation he came away with was, in a cosmic sense, you can't make anyone do anything they don't want to, not even to change their mind. I'd long had that sense. I remember saying something like that to someone way back in my early 20s. I think my take was that people only learn through experience, not through anything they are told. What happens is that if a person has a precipitating experience, when they then encounter certain relevant views or interpretations of others, these can confirm hunches that have been forming for them; these views can can encourage them to formalize paths or ideas that may have been inchoate in the immediate wake of the critical event. So I think it's a good idea to put your ideas out there. They can be of immense support and motivation when a person is open and in the right spot to hear it. To feel it. But don't think you're going to make "those people" stop doing what you don't want them to do. I should add that a person's precipitating event could even be something not in the physical world but something from far inside of a person, something being worked out in relation to their karma, something from a dream even, something about what a person wants to achieve and experience in their incarnation, regardless of whatever worldly rewards might accrue.