Ideological conversion versus metanoia

Susan just read the latest rewrite of  the introduction of my book, and made a remarkable observation about ideologies. Her response was to this passage:

Unfortunately, the progress I made understanding texts with obscure meanings was gained at the expense of the understandability of my own thoughts, which were becoming obscure and poetic. I found that my most significant insights, the ones most central to the metanoia, were almost impossible to speak about directly and explicitly. They were expressed most naturally in practical responses to concrete problems, in how I framed problems and how I thought them through. If I tried to talk about these insights directly, I was at a loss for words and was forced to resort to analogies or images. Whatever it was that I had learned from Nietzsche, it was not primarily new thought content, but something else that took years to pin down with language.

Susan pointed out that where my metanoia experience opened me up to new insights that I could not directly express with language, the people she knows who have experienced ideological conversions seem to undergo precisely the opposite: they are given language to account for their (mostly negative) experiences and these accounts close them to new insights.

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