Somehow…Monday returned. Welcome back! This morning I am headed into Washington, DC to speak to a group of young professionals about communication and breaking through both the noise and polarization. These are tough times for getting your message across. Ears are closed. Eyes are covered. Impressions are set. How do we break through?
I’ll share a few brief thoughts. It’ll be brief mainly because I want you to check out the video today, my interview about the new Superman movie on Fox Radio with Ben Domenech of
. Part of it can be watched here for Free Subscribers to Geeky Stoics, and if you want more, it’s posted here. I know Ben appreciates the views. To watch the whole thing here, like with other videos, you can upgrade to a Paid subscription to support the work we’re doing here. The community is growing! On YouTube, we hit 15,000 subscribers yesterday and notched our one millionth view, thanks in part to this video about Friendship vs Eros (Erotic, Romantic love).Getting Your Message Across
So, as I was saying….how do we break through? It’s all about moral foundations. Once you understand the moral framework your audience is operating under, you can make an effort to appeal to their code and move the needle. In his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt breaks down the moral universes of conservatives and liberals (a simple left-to-right framing) into six pillars.
Care/harm – concern for the suffering of others
Fairness/cheating – emphasis on justice, rights, and equality
Loyalty/betrayal – allegiance to one’s group, family, or nation
Authority/subversion – respect for tradition and legitimate authority
Sanctity/degradation – valuing purity & avoiding the disgusting or profane
Liberty/oppression – a desire to resist domination and tyranny (added later in his framework)
Haidt’s widely acclaimed social science research showed that liberals place an outsized value on 1 and 2, Care and Fairness. Their first principles involve displaying concern for others’ suffering and caring about matters of fairness. Of course, these streams meet on matters of social justice and civil rights. Conservatives are more balanced in how they see the world. Each pillar gets pretty equal attention, with slightly more attention paid to Loyalty and Authority.
They care about Fairness and the factor of equality, but in terms of proportionality to one’s contributions. It’s funny because conservatives think about this with the collective in mind, which is a framework usually used by liberals.
Some outside thoughts on these values from familiar names
C.S. Lewis on his skepticism of Equality: “Do not misunderstand me. I am not in the least belittling the value of this egalitarian fiction, which is our only defence against one another’s cruelty—the function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. By treating the human person as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live. It is idle to say that men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense—if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining—then it is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immortal souls, then I think it conceals a dangerous error.”
In summary, Lewis believed that Equality was a social necessity, but nothing more than that. He held that hierarchies are in keeping with nature (Authority) and that people become vessels for ideas and values, and ideas and values are ranked. “Equality is medicine, not food”. It treats a kind of ailment, but it’s not our reason for being.
J.R.R. Tolkien on Freedom: “-the word has been so abused by propaganda that it has ceased to have any value for reason, and become a mere emotional dose for generating heat.”
A short quote and simple. Freedom is nice, but there are higher goods than freedom, such as Sanctity. You’ll find liberals and conservatives switch places quickly on Freedom when it suits their competing moral pillars.
Once you have this understanding of moral foundations, you can decide whether or not you want to attempt appealing to them for the purpose of making a connection.
Last thing, and for this we’ll return to Narnia’s founder, C.S. Lewis, once more. You have to keep your heart open to the possibility that you’re only being served the worst possible impression of your opponents. We know this. TV news and social media algorithms are designed not to spread truth, but to maintain the audience. If Fox News or MSNBC starts going too easy on the other side, people change the channel. They tuned in for a worldview, so subverting that is not in the business model.
Know this. You can watch and enjoy the “news” but know it’s a form of entertainment, first and foremost.
Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity that with news, we become disappointed when our opponents are anything less than devils. Once we go down that road, we will start to see ourselves, the world, and God...as devils also.
Turns out, believing the best in people is something that extends to how you treat yourself in the mirror. So be gracious.
“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second, then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
-C.S. Lewis in ‘Mere Christianity’
Have a great week, everyone, and thank you for reading Geeky Stoics.
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