Hi John, thanks for your comment! I have a couple reactions to what you've said.

First, I think it's harder to know who's "right" than we tend to think. No one believes they're wrong--we all work very hard to justify what we believe. Instead, we're all trying to make sense of the world, in light of our individual experiences.

Second, I would hesitate to say that people who disagree with me are "brain dead". Problems involving morality have layers and, as Jonathan Haidt desribed in moral foundations theory, we don't all agree on what constitutes morality. People who lean right value six moral dimensions, whereas people on the left tend to value only three. I am a strong left-leaner but have recently become aware of the value of the other dimensions. Sometimes we don't have the whole picture.

This also isn't about "meeting in the middle." It's about persuasion. You'd like to carry on without the people who disagree with you... I think that's possible only to a limited extent. We need a vast majority of people to agree with us before we can make real progress. But people will only agree with us if we help them understand our beliefs and values (and even then, they might have better beliefs and values than we do).

I think the "work" you speak of has less to do with changing the world, per se, and more to do with changing minds. If we can change minds, the world changes on its own. I don't think it works the other way around.