hard work ahead

I'm not much good at changing one person's mind. If there's anybody with a knack for for it, it's not me.
I do have a certain destructive ability to push somebody into tipping his hand, though. It's not always useful; if I've set my mind to it, it means I think everyone around you is better served by seeing you at your worst, and that your best only serves to mask the arsenic. It means I want to assume the best of everyone I meet, but you've served me your last disappointment, and the world would be a better place without you.
Needless to say, I'm occasionally known to jump the gun. People who, for whatever reason, like to poise over a wooden bridge maniacally daring me with a pack of matches in hand usually find I enthusiastically hand them the gasoline. Naturally, too, it's not a perfect science and sometimes a genuine shitpiece still comes off looking like a rose.
I've had my mind changed on very large, very central subjects. Usually it's a science fiction book what does it.
One caused me to decide, despite its pessimism, that humans are a decent enough lot that maybe we should live better than we do, and maybe we shouldn't die along with everything else on this planet: that humanity can't be a virus, because a virus needs something living to infect.
Another convinced me that determinism is unrealistic, at odds with both theory and evidence, that the road from A to B is fuzzy and occasionally takes meaningful detours through C, and that the road from B to A instead leads to 0 or Pi, or maybe just a twisted lump where A should be. Sparrows may fall, but they don't unfall, and if they did, they might not fall given another chance.
It would be valuable to me to learn to change one mind. Not to set a dozen people at odds with the monster among them, but to find the good and bring it forth for that one to see.
It won't always be there, but if I can learn how, perhaps I can do it just once.
So I should return to Hume. I have heard it said Hume is the first step toward Hegel, and the meeting of two forces and the emergent phenomena thereof was Hegel's business.
It's damn near impossible bootstrapping to get there.