Aim Through The Target
As Election Day approaches, tension rises in campaigns and stress-inducing ads and blogs and arguments mix into a cacaphony which becomes a blur -- a gloss. Persuading someone to vote at all can be difficult in this crunch time. Persuading them to vote for your choice can be even more difficult.
Whether you are talking to a potential voter by phone or in person, cutting through the gloss requires something in short supply: listening. Listening is the essence of persuasion. Obama is a master of it. We should use the election season to work on our own skills and edify our minds: by canvassing.
Always do right. It'll gratify a few and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain
Most of the money being spent now by many campaigns is wasted. Some of the money being spent now is invaluable. It is hard to know, in the mix, which dollar is which. But time, especially time spent talking to a fellow citizen or writing to them in person, is priceless. That act, in all its forms, especially in this most political of seasons in life, is canvassing. You, just you, are engaged in an act of mutual persuasion with a fellow citizen when you canvass.
Taking time seems impossible in an atmosphere like this. We have visions of horror wreaked by roving hoards of politicians we don't support and don't even like having the power to dictate how we are going to live our lives. Their supporters have visions of horror thinking of our choice. Many of our choices on any ballot are either unknown to us or a sad choice between bad and worse. No ballot I've ever voted was all golden.
Politics Is Local -- In Fact, It Is Personal
In your voting district, your ballots often have decisions voters in other districts don't have to decide. On those issues, you can be edified by fellow voters, no matter how much you may disagree on political candidates. If you take the time to talk to them about the election as a whole, you may even find yourself in a pleasant conversation.
I find the racism ends when someone gets to know me as a person.
Barack Obama
Interview on WOI Radio
December, 2008
(author's paraphrase -- if anyone can find a link I'd appreciate it)
But such time to sit back and jaw a while isn't part of modern life, especially now with kids in school and winter coming and harvest coming in and... and....
Conversations don't have to be long to be valuable. The line between talking to, or at, someone and having a conversation is a shift in attitude by both people in the conversation. It is often surprising, as a causal conversation on an airplane or gathering for a meeting, how some of the most interesting conversations spring up. By surprise. Unexpected delight.
It all starts when someone starts listening.
Be The Lightening Rod
Listening comes naturally when you are interested in what you are hearing. It's built in. It's DNA-programmed by millenia of evolutionary progress.
When I train software support teams, I start with two rules:
- Grow callouses on your butt
- Find the starting point of the conversation
When people call for support, they are rarely in a good mood. They are usually as in a hurry and you can get. "Payroll checks have to print NOW! The employees are at my door and leaving for the weekend. Hell, I'M leaving early for the weekend. Your %#^#_@&!@ doesn't work. Fix it!" It is a rule of the universe that those calls will come on Friday afternoon, right before you yourself are ready to leave early for a much-anticipated weekend.
There is no rational basis for conversation in a moment like this. But in every moment like this there is always a conversation to be had, at any time. The trick is finding it (and finding it quick).
So when I get a support call, I say hello, if they aren't already screaming, I ask them what I can do to help them. In this situation, people are "charged", what Carl Jung called numinous. They are a electrical condenser waiting to unload a charge into anything that can ground it.
I become the ground wire. Here's where the callouses on your butt come in handy. After many years, you, your company and your product have already been called every nasty thing in the book. People have lied to you, especially if the truth would cost them more. People are embarrassed and hiding it behind a fusilade of preemptive attacks.
But if I don't speak (other than asking them to go on when I sense they are still charged) until their charge is fully discharged; if I don't interfere with that offloading by being cute or smart or bored or distracted: inevitably, they will exhaust their emotion and there will be a pause.
A pause.
They won't remember most of what they just said. They weren't listening to themselves. What they said will be jumbled up and contradictory if they are really pissed off. But because your butt is so calloused they could chew on it all they want but you can still listen and take notes on what they have said. You have had a chance to put a coherent shape together of what they have said, and you can give it back to them when the time is right. You have listened so intently you can give shape to the message they are trying to send for them.
At that pause, usually about thirty to ninety seconds into the call, a conversation awaits. That's where its thread lies. When I sense that pause, and know they sense it, too, I tell them what I heard them say. In doing so, I also tell them as well that I was listening, and want to listen more. I let them correct or enhance on what I tell them they said, and then I repeat all of it back to them until we have shaped a story both of us are sure was meant.
Together.
Conversations help us shape our own ideas. Korzybski called this using your fellow human beings as extraneural means for finding and stored knowledge. The full flower of all these extraneural means we find and weave into each other is the lore we pass on to future generations.
Gregory Bateson was a student of Korzybski and said once that Alfred's ideas helped him understand as an anthropologist that human beings leave two kinds of lore to their progeny: sacraments and artifacts.
Artifacts we can dig up from the past and analyze and store and study. Sacraments cannot be stored anywhere but in human hearts. They must be shared so they can be passed on.
Voting is such a sacrament. Voting is our sacrament, shared with all our fellow citizens by right embued in us by the Creator -- whether sentinent or inference. Someone had a conversation once. Someone's child overheard some of it. They had a conversation with their child. Korzybski called this process timebinding.
Since it is software my team wrote, I can see the screen and play through the keystrokes and clicks silently as I listen. I forget time and put myself in the moment with them. Often I have them repeat what they did and let them lead me through the journey. We work together to negotiate crossroads and explore workarounds. Together we figure out what is going on and, most of the time, they learn more about what the software is meant to do and how many ways they can get the same task done.
If there is a bug, I don't hide it, but hold it up like having bagged a prize and thank them for helping me find it. I slowly put more charge into the conversation. In thirty years, I can remember only a handful of conversations where they didn't end with a positive charge for both of us.
Each of us has a safe space in which we feel comfortable. By listening, we invite others into that space with us, if they are willing. We take the lightening bolt to the ground for them and act like nothing happened at all.
Because nothing really did.
We can chose how we react to words. Alfred Korzybski called this a semantic reaction. His work Science And Sanity was used to teach propaganda analysis for many years when I was in college. When words or phrases (or songs or pictures or ads or...) are deliberated charged with negativity, and done in a way we don't notice, we can find ourselves controlled by them. Wendall Johnson called the lifelong accumulation of these emotional triggers a verbal cocoon into which we retreat as we avoid situations or conversations which trigger the painful semantic reactions.
Korzybski believed we could resist this natural accumulation of triggers by learning to notice them. When we pay attention to how we feel about words, we notice the ones that really get us going and those that really hurt and we can begin to ponder why it is they evoke such reactions in us. Korzybski called this the semantic pause -- before we give in to the reactionary meaning, we note its emotional charge. He believed mathematical education and the study of logics (not just traditional logic, but the whole variety of ways people wire ideas together to map the world around them and make sense of it) of all kinds helped us keep the charged triggers from controlling our lives.
Pausing Saves
You can’t reason with the heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
Mark Twain
Semantic reactions are also positive. Patriotism is a positive reaction, but the triggers can be very different. A tea party friend of mine loved the Glenn Beck rally. One of the reasons was, as a vet, he hungered to hear some patriotic rhetoric. Years of having to suppress his experiences and insights from having served in the military because of the negative reaction of people who had never served is released in tears and a wave of emotion when someone recognizes that reality. Leave aside that his perception may be skewed, and "reality" is different. Reality, for him, is what it is. It is none of my business to "teach" him any different.
Second, I realized that most of his friends never knew that mattered to him. We often don't know what others hide from us, sometimes especially those closest to us in our daily lives. We will never know all of what a person holds back from us. Most of it is none of our business. But people who have shared a common set of experiences can't even articulate most of what that means to them. But they know it, each of them and among them. That knowing opens the potential for fellowship and, together, articulating and re-enacting and honoring each other. What is hidden in each of us is most of the meaningful things in our lives. Only our fellows can bring it out, and only when we are together conversing, writing to one another or reading a missive from one another.
In fellowship we find ourselves.
Immersion In Citizenhood
An honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.
Mark Twain
It is that boundless pool of our common weal that we can only plumb with our fellow citizens -- preserving and evolving our generation's sacraments. The election season is at its best when we use it as an opportunity to plumb each others' depths. The topics are in the air.
My General Semantics professor told the class a story one day to illustrate how easy it is to wander thorugh life in our verbal cocoons and miss out on all the potential convesations we could enjoy.
A man from the city was driving far from home on a gravel road in the country when his car broke down. It was a dark and rainy night. He opened his trunk to find he had left his jack at home. Cursing his misfortune, he looked around in desperation and saw a distant light wavering in the distance. Having no choice (this was before everyone had cell phones), he trudged down the road in his good clothes through the mud and shivered from being soaked to his skin.
As he walked, he began wondering who lived where the light was. This was out in the country and all kinds of strange people could live out here. He began looking around to see if those wierdos from the movie Deliverance were skulking about, stalking him. He jumped at sounds in the woods and fields around him.
As he turned into the lane up to a farmer's house, he looked around suspiciously. "Bet he won't help me." he thought. "I'll bet he has twenty jacks out there in that barn but he'll tell me he doesn't have a jack. How could a farmer not have a jack! He's a liar. He'll make me go back to my car." On and on the dialog in his head went, imagining a hundred different bad conversatons. By the time he stumbled onto the porch, his fists were clenched, ready for a fight.
He pounded on the door. The farmer opened the door wide, smiling. The man screamed, "Keep your damn jack!" and stomped off into the night.
Only we can weave semantic cocoons. It is a uniquely human ability, and our own cocoons are festooned with our own sense of pain and pleasure. Words and images stike us in ways unlike any other person. Propaganda is just enhancing what is already within us. Writing is evoking in others what we can find in ourselves and our experiences with those we have encountered. My tea party friend likes Beck because Beck seems to understand that hunger to be praised for serving his country, even though he would never dare ask that of anyone. Beck knows that trigger. It makes him feel like Beck knows his name.
Beck started the conversation. My friend responded, and was open to what else he had to say. Fox News is effective because it knows what some people want to hear. Conservatives thought they had the world figured out. Their verbal cocoons mapped the political world from Reagan to now in a great arc of continuity. The elections of 2006 and 2008, and the embarassing ineptitude of Bush Jr., have echoed in the depths and fear has been the semantic reaction.
Behold What You Want To Become
But Fox News' message, as a medium, is the first part of that support call -- them yelling. In fact, when there is a chance the conversation could fall to that initial point in which true conversation begins, they deliberately inject a barb. They trip another trigger. It's like dancing on a floor covered with live wires. The emotions flow so freely the watchers' own triggers are being fired off. It's a kick. It's entertainment. They go for the jugular. They disdain political correctness.
A sin takes on new and real terrors when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out.
Mark Twain
The Fox News Experience is a guilty pleasure made less guilty when its audience can avoid people who don't enjoy it, too. "Did you see Hannity the other night" becomes a variation on "Are you saved?". Do you share this secret with me? You aren't one of them, are you?
Can I talk to you? Are you safe?
A farmer was out in his field fixing fence by the road when a car pulled up. It was a family from the city and they told him they were thinking of moving out to the country. They asked him what people were like around here.
The farmer nodded and asked, "What are people like where you live now?" The family told him how it was too crowded and dangerous and neighbors didn't really like each other. The farmer nodded and said, "I 'spect you'll find the same around here." The family looked disappointed and went on their way.
Another day, he was working by the road and another family pulled up, also from the city and looking to move out into the country. They asked him what people were like around here. The farmer asked them, "What are people like where you live now?"
They told him how nice their neighbors were and how much they were involved in their community, but they really wanted to live on a small acreage and have pets and grow a garden. The farmer smiled and nodded and said, "I 'spect you'll find the same around here."
Fox News is designed to endlessly avoid conversation. The Republican Party members of Congress have connived to endlessly avoid legislating (a conversation in a different mode). Presidents can't break this logjam. Parties can't break this jogjam. Pundits won't, it means ratings to them.
Only citizens can. Only citizens can adapt and change. Everybody else is locked into their positions. We are the People, and we can, have, will, must change to survive. Perhaps even to thrive. God willing, perhaps even prosper together.
When you approach a potential voter, all of these silent triggers could be there. If they are a conservative you may even be afraid of any argument with them and decide to say, "Keep your damn jack." But they are a voter, and that means they are a free citizen of this United States. They believe in many things you do. Most people are not mean and very few are violent. Jon Stewart is preaching that to us using guerilla comedy. President Obama is teaching that to us with his own mastery of citizenship.
You may have noticed that the less I know about a subject the more confidence I have, and the more new light I throw on it.
Mark Twain
Comedians are masters of seeing things-of-which-we-want-to-speak-but-must-not, like poker players are seeing our tells. Politicians are as well. Some professions require persuasion, often under the most pressure-packed conditions where no one starts out trusting anyone else.
When you are going get-out-the-vote, you learn to see the tells or hear them on the phone or write to evoke them in a blog. Writing, to my mind, is one of the purer ways to listen. When you write to evoke the message out of the depths of the reader's own verbal cocoon, you both expand and relax both cocoons. You take a little of them into yourself. You remember them. You are civil, and you both feel a very non-guilty pleasure in that.
Gentle pleasures coming from being good to each other. But a lifetime spent often in good conversations with all the people you encounter is a path in which you gain credibility -- the more so if you realize that minding your integrity is important to your prosperity. But "credibility", "integrity" and "prosperity" are not only about you or me. They have no meaning if there is no community in which you are a citizen along with many others. The meaning of these words rises out of good souls being good citizens and neighbors to each other. The meaning of these words rise out of ample times of fellowship one with another.
Be The Change You've Been Waiting For
We need our cocoons. We just need them to keep adapting and changing and not become cynical and scared and fossilize. Conversations with your fellow citizens, as many of them as you can muster, do just that. A good spouse or sibling or parent or friend shapes your cocoon as they allow you to shape theirs -- and they know every trigger point, good and bad. In all our family and community relationships, listening leads to being listened to, and then to mutual trust.
If you are canvassing (and every time you pause to converse with a fellow citizen in this political season, you are canvassing), be sure to look for the tells of when someone passing by might want to talk. Don't miss that opportunity. That's the heart of the effort. Only a few will be able to pause for that brief conversation, but a few moments to converse with a fellow citizen is worth all the time. When they pause, introduce yourself and zone out everything else. Be interested in them and their political insights and perspectives. Listen to them, say back to them what you heard them say and then respond. In context. Without scripting. Converse. You were literally born knowing how to do that.
President Obama has learned this skill. He listens deeply, and he responds in depth. He assumes a conversation is starting just as a master salesman assumes the sales the moment he sees the prospect == and Obama jumps into that conversation with his fellow citizen. Be that present and respectful in your momentary conversations, no matter the medium. It is our responsibility, as citizens, to start really talking in fellowship with our fellow citizens.
You may end up talking to someone whose political choices really grate against your grain. It's OK. Fellow citizens can still talk. Ask about other issues on your local ballot. More often than not, you will find you both agree on many things. Work your way to the "hot" race from the "cold" ones -- but local and interesting just to voters in your district. Bond. Build. Behold each other, if only for a brief moment.
A round man cannot be expected to fit into a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.
Mark Twain
The only way to pull conservatives, moderates and independents away from the Becks and Palins is to engage them in more conversations, and by listening find out why -- what is it they like? What trips their triggers? What are their triggers? What triggers of yours do they trip? Reveal your tells as you learn theirs. The way we are endowed or wired to do. All of us. Each of us.
Converse. Persuade. At least vote, for both our sakes. It was nice to meet you.
That's it. That's the script. That's a canvassing moment. But the silent part, the word that isn't there, is the first word in that script:
Listen.
GOTV
The series so far:
T - 10: The Prisoner's Dilemma
T - 9: I Voted Today
God Bless The Skeptics - A Musing
T - 7: The Problem With Money
T - 6: OK, I skipped six.