Translating Me or You into Us
(Originally published in Green Horizon Quarterly Winter 2007)
How does a political party dedicated to sustainability maintain its integrity and expand its credibility in the midst of a poisonous, slash-and-burn political culture? The long-term future of the
Even if the outcome of the recent mid-term elections reflects widespread revulsion toward ideological politics and Orwellian government, nothing substantive has been promoted by the mainstream political parties as an alternative. Many doubt that anything new is likely to emerge from them. Nevertheless, the possibility for improvement does exist. Scientific research has already illuminated many exciting avenues for improving public participation and the quality of political decision-making.
Political parties typically put the preponderance of their resources into gaining power. They assume that political power is a pre-requisite for governing. Because this could become substantially less true in the future than it is currently, Greens have a rare opportunity. We could be the ones who learn how to govern—in effect—without access to the traditional apparatus of power. Accomplishing this will entail the adoption of new methods, technologies, and, more fundamentally, a different stance in how we talk to and, ultimately, with
The New Politics May Not Even Resemble the Old Politics
In 2004 Democrats were galvanized by George Lakoff’s book don’t think of an elephant! [stet]. His message was very simple; understand the values in play and use language strategically to control the debate so that putatively progressive values triumph. He modeled this advice on his analysis of the Republican party’s public relations machine which has so successfully used Madison Avenue-style misdirection— “death taxes,” “no child left behind,” “culture of death”—to manipulate public attitudes. He proposed that Democrats play a similarly manipulative game, albeit in the service of superior values.
This divide and conquer strategy, made notorious by Machiavelli and refined to a science by Karl Rove, as well as Lakoff’s response to the recent Neo-conservative modernization of it, derive their attractiveness from the assumption that political dominance can be achieved simply by polarizing people and using their strongly felt passions to manipulate their voting behavior. While history confirms the potential effectiveness of this approach, in their zeal to adapt it to American culture, Republicans and Democrats have failed to grasp that the power gained this way is inevitably contested, usually short-lived, and comes at a profound cost to society.
Part of that cost has been immediate, direct and financial. Aggregate campaign expenditures in national elections run ten or more times higher than they did a decade ago. What Americans now squander on election hostilities could transform the lives of millions. The money to support this escalation has been raised at the expense of the nation’s economic foundation—the American middle-class. In the last thirty years, an astonishing amount of wealth has been transferred from middle-class Americans to an elite class of large political donors. As President Bush characterized this new class in a speech to his major contributors, “What we have here are the haves and the have mores. Some people call them the elite, but I call them my base.” The political machines of both Democrats and Republicans have been appropriating middle-class assets to feed this new base which, in turn, feeds the parties.
Other costs exacted from the culture, comity and future prospects of the nation are harder to quantify but clearly more damaging. The fabric of American cultural values is being distorted in qualitative ways that undermine the vitality of our civilization and our international reputation.
The Fundamental Culture of
Beneath a superficial charm, American culture is becoming callous, deceitful, and increasingly exploitive. Since these are pathological characteristics, it should come as no surprise that research indicates that one in every twenty-five Americans is now a functional sociopath. Compare this with one in one thousand in
How we talk to and relate with each other matters very much. The way we are currently doing it, is making us and our society ill. Over the last two generations we have seen a chasm developing between people and our society’s institutions—both private and public. A spirit of adversarialism is poisoning every sector of society and undermining our ability to meet the challenges and opportunities that a rapidly evolving world is presenting us. This has real consequences. While superficially successful, the
has fallen to 16th as of this year. According to the World Health Organization our health care system has fallen to 37th, and we have become the biggest debtor nation in the world. This is not a good trend. History is full of cultures that began well and ended badly.
We have no one to blame for this other than ourselves—really—the French didn’t do it to us. Having settled the issue of blame, there remains the issue of what to do about the situation.
Back to the Future
Americans need to become connoisseurs of leadership. We need to be able to tell good from bad at a glance. Good leadership demands discerning followers who push and prod their leaders to pursue the extraordinary. This country needs new methods, big initiatives, real dialog and courageous action. According to this election, that is what people want. Americans are increasingly disenchanted with the culture of exploitation that has so badly betrayed classic democratic ideals. Over the last six years our nation flirted with totalism as promoted in the Neo-conservative agenda. Having now observed the consequences of reactive authoritarianism, we are recoiling. People are hungry to be appreciated and supported for what is best in them.
If sociopathy is characterized by exploitation, then the majority of Americans are craving supportive relationships with their society and their leaders. Think about a family argument. It can be ferocious. An outsider might expect blood to fly in response to angry and blunt characterizations. But it is rare that families disintegrate into enduringly hostile camps. Almost always a new and better equilibrium emerges. That is the magic of genuine relationship. It is a magic we need to harness among ourselves and bring back to society.
In this we are incredibly fortunate. To date, the West has accumulated almost 100 years of research on group decision-making. We now know, via science, things that this nation’s founders could only intuit. More importantly, we know ways to fulfill their vision of wise governance that were entirely unknowable to them. For instance, we know with certainty that with the right approach, groups can make superior decisions, faster, than their smartest individual member. Most importantly, research has identified the core requirements for assuring that groups make wise decisions—decisions that solve problems without creating more problems than were solved. This research has already led to the development of a number of methodologies for fulfilling those requirements; at least one of which could be implemented over the internet.
Then there is language. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out on the opening page of his 1947 Letter on Humanism, “Language is the house of being.” Instead of using language as a weapon to conquer mind-space, the know-how already exists to use it facilitatively to increase our society’s intelligence, build social capital and transform challenges into opportunities.
Psychologists have recognized for decades that a large part of the process of socialization in any culture consists of teaching the young that which they must not see, not hear, not think, feel, or say. Social demarcation of sexual roles highlights this. Men are expected to behave like “men” and women like “women” in spite of the fact that most of us, having had both a mother and a father, can more than adequately fulfill either role; and, in stressful situations like single parenthood, often do. As a quick reminder of the power of acculturation, imagine yourself saying aloud, in a mixed group in public, the word “menstruate.” Just the thought experiment is sufficient to make most of us blanch.
Since the demands of reality regularly require broaching such socially engrained taboos, a large part of human communication takes place outside of direct consciousness. Consider that in the
Beyond the complexities of signaling, people are also conditioned to communicate in sanctioned styles. The relationship between the meaning of words and structure of presentation profoundly shapes communication. You can communicate the same information with a whisper or a shout, with a tome of sarcasm or praise, with a declaration or a question and the way this is done is as telling as the content.
As a result of these factors, miscommunication among people is guaranteed, especially among those who do not share common acculturation in tacit signals. This is what makes diplomacy so diplomatic. It also makes it possible to code messages to say one thing to one group of people and something entirely different to other constituencies. The ambiguities of communication were used brilliantly by Karl Rove to strongly appeal to evangelicals without alienating other segments of society. Many Americans might not have voted for George Bush had they realized that through his calculated use of evangelical phrases in his speeches, he was tacitly promising evangelicals that Armageddon and the second coming would happen in their lifetime.
There is a fundamental bias integral to the process of communication that profoundly influences group process. People turn data into meaning using their personal beliefs as the instrument of construction. Beliefs are highly influenced by culture and remarkably stable. Having once assembled an acceptable meaning from immediately available information, any questioning that might reveal a different interpretation is shouldered aside in favor of the seductive security of comfortable certainty. People assemble a picture of the reality they expect from the information they receive, and stop there, rather than engaging in the constant exercise of "not knowing," that might lead to insight and better understanding.
Whipsawed by events, people indulge in rituals of certainty; engineering illusions of unanimity, rather than continuing to ask questions. It is hard to get people to explore areas that cause them discomfort, where answers are not readily apparent. It is compellingly easy to manipulate the longing for certainty. Leaders are especially susceptible to doing this because in most cultures, including ours, they are expected to maintain control and appear to be knowledgeable at all times. With the power to either inspire or demand compliance, they easily slip into dictating expedient answers rather than facilitating the emergence of genuine solutions.
When the goal of communication is a creative, forward looking response to challenge, people behave differently. They listen carefully. They ask questions. They conjecture, explore and test. Above all, they are pragmatic. In a culture where communication is facilitative, leadership is responsible for clarifying that a need exists, that an appropriate group is convened to meet the challenge, that an effective process is used to deliver wise decisions and that the forthcoming decisions are effectively and efficiently implemented.
Such an approach in our culture is so uncommon that it is considered newsworthy, as when the 911 Commission was convened with great public fanfare over the assurance from the White House that the commission’s recommendations would be implemented. The promise was necessary because the normal behavior of political leaders is to ignore the recommendations of blue ribbon commissions.
Process is the Ultimate Message in Politics
Were the Green Party to take on the role of national facilitator, what would that job entail? When acting as catalysts, facilitators enable groups to make effective use of their resources and adopt synergistic ways of behaving. This requires being alert to and subtly enhancing the group’s ability to be inclusive, to maintain participant independence, to draw on an appropriately diverse knowledge base, and to synthesize the agendas and understandings of all the stakeholders into implementable decisions. Furthermore, a good facilitator urges the group to engage in increasingly valuable action. If we substitute “society” for “group,” does this seem too utopian a role for Greens to consider assuming? Hasn’t the Green Party essentially done exactly this, albeit to a limited degree, even in the absence of significant political power? If you shape a society’s strategic agenda and promote constructive behavior to achieve that agenda, are you not, in a fundamental sense, governing?
The language, methods and tools to support being catalysts in society are available for any relevant human scale. They are already in use on a limited basis. The potential of these tools to promote constructive behavior far exceeds that of our familiar political process. What does this mean? Imagine the word “consensus” coming to denote universal and passionate commitment to a wise decision. By way of contrast, the Republican and Democratic parties’ application of traditional political power, has been characterized by consistent failure to mobilize action scaled to the gravity of the challenges confronting the nation.
The greatest difficulty we will face in picking up these new tools and using them, is surrendering what has become familiar, including our attachment to a positional point of view. We would have to trust that “the people,” all of us working together, are capable of quickly making wise decisions. Is comfortable familiarity too much to trade for a Green Party that is the keeper of a process for empowering Americans to make and implement wise decisions. There are 100 years of scientists’ shoulders on which to stand. The research has already been done, the methods and tools exist, an infrastructure is in place. All that’s lacking is the will, a plan and the decision.
The future has always gone to those best able to translate “you or me” into “us.” For most of history “us” has been imposed on people. While this was usually accomplished at a horrifying cost in lives and treasure, it was sufficient to create nations of “us.” Classic forms of electoral democracy made the process of creating “us” significantly cheaper and faster, but no longer fast or powerful enough to meet current demands. As a nation, we are, more often than not, hiding from the challenges that face us rather than mobilizing to meet them. Democracy is still the way to go, but we clearly need a more agile, effective democratic process. What are we waiting for?
