CULTURE

The Proper Way To Eat An Elephant

The key to changing our culture is not with big swings but with small shifts in thinking that allow for incremental change

The South African theologian Desmond Tutu once said that the best way to eat an elephant was one bite at a time. Additionally, we are often reminded that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and that we must learn to walk before we can ever hope to run. These cliches hold universal truths that have been borne out time and again throughout human history. Most innovation, after all, comes from being able to grasp a hold of what was previously only just beyond our reach — and rarely by making quantum leaps forward.

This is not to say we should ever relinquish lofty goals or big dreams. How will we ever get anywhere without a destination in mind? It’s all fine and well to put one foot in front of the other, to only worry about what we can see in front of us, but if you want to cross an ocean, you need a bit more long-term planning. You need almost supernatural vision, and a hefty helping of good, old-fashioned faith. Otherwise, you risk walking in circles.

Personally, I hate incremental change. It’s dull, boring, and tedious. There is nothing sexy about building on a foundation of previous achievement. It requires patience and perseverance, not mere inspiration, providence, or luck. There is nothing magical about it. Not an ounce of surprise or excitement. Just a lot of hard, often painful, toil and trouble. In a nutshell, it’s hard work and it sucks.

I want what we all want — the miracle. A magical result with no basis in reality or logic for being. We want two plus two to equal forty-four, not four. We dream about the unexpected and hold out for the deeply improbable. We want to win the lottery, not earn a fortune over a lifetime of sacrifice. We want it all at once, not incrementally.

Baby Steps

In the 1991 classic “What About Bob,” Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss) unassumingly takes on a new psychiatric patient named Bob Wiley (Bill Murray), who proceeds to ruin his life. Dr. Marvin has written a bestselling book called “Baby Steps,” in which he recommends not thinking too far ahead in life, but taking it one step at a time. Baby steps.

This sounds like the kind of trite, psychiatric advice you could expect from a comedy, but there is a lot of truth to it. Even within the comedy logic of the movie, Dr. Marvin’s advice works for Bob, just not the way Leo thinks it should. Bob goes on a string of adventures that allow him to get outside of his comfort zone and face his fears. Unfortunately, all his adventures involve Dr. Marvin’s family and associates. Bob is sucking the life out of Leo, but he is also progressing forward. One step at a time.

He’s a sailor. He sails.

From Hater To True Believer

It should come as a shock to no one that there is no direct path for someone to go from hater to true believer. There is the Paul of Tarsus dream of supernatural conversion, but it’s rare, if not entirely unrealistic. The committed Klan member who becomes a social Justice warrior overnight makes for a good Hollywood story but is rarely a reality.

While people can change, and there are plenty of occasions where people do experience dramatic conversions, it’s much more of a process than people think. It’s closer to the “overnight success” of the actor you didn’t previously know, but who has been toiling away in obscurity for decades. There was really never anything sudden or overnight about it.

Instead, we move one step at a time. It may begin with doubts about what we assumed was a given, a crack in the armor of our dogma. But it starts small and grows. As Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

We break down and grow anew. It takes time. One day it appears as though we have suddenly made a dramatic change, but it wasn’t sudden. It was gradual, even if it fell all at once.

Effective Manipulation Through Emotion

I’ve spent a career discovering and developing ways to manipulate consumers emotionally in order to alter, encourage or discourage human behavior. Very few effective branding techniques do not rely on making an emotional appeal that transcends intellectual arguments. We rely on the heart, not the head, to change people’s behavior

The ultimate in brand loyalty is the brand evangelist, the consumer who so closely identifies with the brand that they feel emotionally invested in the success of the brand. At this level of identification, even slight criticism of the brand amounts to criticism of who they are as a person. It becomes an aspect of their very identity, not just an intellectual exercise of choosing one brand over another. It’s who they are, not what they buy.

But when you’re trying to encourage and recruit brand evangelists, you don’t start with people who hate your brand. You don’t even start with people who are apathetic towards it — those occasional and casual users of your brand. You start with people who are loyal consumers but not yet fervent advocates. Additionally, if you want to build your base of loyal customers, you start with people who are already occasional users. The point is you don’t try to get someone to go from A to Z. You try to move them from A to B. Baby steps. One at a time.

How to Change Minds and Influence People

In Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film “Gandhi,” the titular character is speaking to a small group of young men who have come to see him. They are in the midst of a great battle to gain India’s independence from Great Britain. Gandhi believes that the only way to accomplish this enormous task is through non-violence.

“Where there is injustice, I always believed in fighting,” he tells them. “The question is, do you fight to change things, or do you fight to punish? I’ve found we’re all such sinners we should leave punishment to God.”

His strategy, as he explains later to the British high command, is to operate in such a way that eventually, the British come to realize the wisdom and inevitability of this course of action. In essence, he wants to lead them slowly, guiding them along the way until they believe it is their idea.

This is how we have think about changing the hearts and minds of our fellow men. We don’t try to change their entire worldview, but maybe just point out just one errant delusion and then allow them to question its veracity themselves.

The Space To Turn Around

If your goal is to win arguments, then you’ll likely be unsuccessful at changing anyone’s mind. The less dogmatic you are, in your opinion, the more space you give someone else to change theirs. No one changes their mind when backed into a corner. We all need space to turn around. Your goal has to be to share information and encourage questions.

If you’re willing to question your own biases, you might encourage them to question theirs. Ask them about their ideas. Make them explain them to you, not with the purpose of discounting them or refuting them. Let that go. Make them try to convince you with their own logic. Don’t shift the focus or let them change the subject. Stick to one idea at a time. Take it to its logical conclusion. Ask leading questions. When in doubt, repeat their last statement back to them as a question.

You don’t have to agree with a single thing they said, but if you seem to be actually listening, thoughtfully and willfully, they will be willing to keep talking. If their logic is flawed, they will wrap themselves in knots trying to work it out. It’s one thing to make a provocative statement but quite another to prove a point to its conclusion. Let them get there on their own, possibly with a little encouragement from yourself. Expressing interest but disbelief is not a bad position to take. Remain curious and open.

The Best Offense Is No Defense

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you want to win the long game, you can’t be defensive in your approach to engaging the opposition. It’s more gratifying to win by beating your opponent, but if you don’t win your opponent over, you’ve only won a battle and never the war. The problem with too much of today’s partisan rancor is that everyone is focused on winning the fight at hand and not the hearts and minds of the country.

The Republicans have done a much better job at strategizing long-term strategies, but where they fall short is that their approach is to change the rules of the game to disenfranchise their opponent rather than win them over. The Democrats, on the other hand, have no long-term strategy but seem to expend all their energy defending themselves against the constant attacks from the Right.

The Democrats desperately want to win over voters intellectually, but seem to have no idea how to connect emotionally. The Republicans are entirely emotional with no substance or effort to govern whatsoever. Being in charge seems to be the singular goal.

There is an Indian proverb that says, “Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit.” The lesson being that planning for the future is not always a short process or even one you will witness yourself.

If we have any hope of turning this country around and away from our headlong rush towards authoritarianism, we have to think long-term.

Winning Hearts Not Minds

Even if you can convince someone to change their opinion on a single point, let alone the larger, more important issues of our time, the purpose must be to change how someone feels about something, not merely how they think about something.

Democrats too often make the mistake of trying to make an intellectual argument in an environment fraught with emotion. They are trying to win minds without first winning hearts. This is a recipe for disaster.

Despite what people think, very few of us have entirely independent ideas on policy issues. We rely on experts, pundits, and the winds of public opinion to tell us how we should feel about something. Notice I didn’t even mention what we think about anything because it’s all about how we feel.

If Democrats truly want to embrace empathy as a path towards a greater, more perfect democracy, then they must begin to engage with, and try to determine what it is that has driven 75 million Americans towards an autocratic political party. Regardless of the rampant disinformation they endure, the disingenuous right-wing media bubble, the historical issues of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and magical thinking, the Democratic Party has not offered these desperate Americans a reasonable alternative.

Yes We Can

I’m a storyteller. I tell stories. It doesn’t matter whether I am representing a billion-dollar corporation or writing a fictional short story, human narrative is the way we express emotional details to other human beings. There are a few of us who derive great satisfaction and abundant meaning from reading scientific articles full of facts of figures, but most of us need a narrative for even that to make sense in any practical form.

Barack Obama came closest to this in 2008 with his presidential campaign centered around hope. Unfortunately, Obama was merely a man, not a god, and I don’t think any of us were prepared for the racist backlash his presidency would inflict upon the nation. His presidency did not heal the nation, nor should it ever have been expected to. But it did reveal finally just how broken we were, how deeply flawed we had always been. It showed us the cracks that could let the light in.

You can think of Obama’s presidency as a failure to realize our potential or you can recognize it as the beginning of new chapter in American culture. He wasn’t able to finish what he started — just as many before him have been unable to do: Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Stephen Biko, and Nelson Mandela. They paved the way, at least their part of the way, but did not promise to bring us home. We have to do that for ourselves.

Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary speech from Jan 8, 2008, remains a seminal turn for American politics. We should recognize that it wasn’t the end but the beginning. It was actually a short speech and maybe, if not for recording artist Will.I.Am who converted it into a song, it might have been lost to history books. It goes in part:

“It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.

“It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.

“It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.

“It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.

“Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.”