A woman called in to your show at around 8:15 am (I listen in Albuquerque). She said something that REALLY has made me rethink my perspective on communicating with people. She pointed out that the GOP communicates with their constituency using words and images that evoke a gut, primal reaction, and that perhaps we should attempt to communicate this way, too.
I truly believe that she is on to something important here. The left is known for privileging the intellectual over the visceral. And the right is known for privileging the visceral. Clearly, both worldviews have been and continue to be advantageous to social cohesion, subsistence, and generally the survival of our species and therefore must have been strongly selected for. The right has lots of babies. More than the left, I’d wager, but that’s another story. Therefore both worldviews are proven to be valid and valuable to our species as a whole.
Adherents to these worldviews have become adversarial, as each side believes strongly that certain rules must be in place to keep their version of society standing. Each mocks the other and prides itself. We in the left have railed against the fact that studies and statistics appear to have absolutely no impact on the right. And they have scorned us for our “intellectual elitism,” disloyalty to our country, and cowardice. The right are not inherently bad people. They are people with a different way of communicating, and the GOP have exploited that.
We need to communicate with them. We need to communicate in a way that they can understand and accept. I’m not talking about talking down, just telling the truth in a different way than we have been (which is obviously not working). Maybe we could air PSAs of people who benefit from the ACA, or show images of actual refugees and telling individual stories. Rather than statistics, I believe this will actually be taken in and understood by those we are trying to reach. And this is really what we want. I want to think about this more. I think this can really be done, though.
I truly believe that she is on to something important here. The left is known for privileging the intellectual over the visceral. And the right is known for privileging the visceral. Clearly, both worldviews have been and continue to be advantageous to social cohesion, subsistence, and generally the survival of our species and therefore must have been strongly selected for. The right has lots of babies. More than the left, I’d wager, but that’s another story. Therefore both worldviews are proven to be valid and valuable to our species as a whole.
Adherents to these worldviews have become adversarial, as each side believes strongly that certain rules must be in place to keep their version of society standing. Each mocks the other and prides itself. We in the left have railed against the fact that studies and statistics appear to have absolutely no impact on the right. And they have scorned us for our “intellectual elitism,” disloyalty to our country, and cowardice. The right are not inherently bad people. They are people with a different way of communicating, and the GOP have exploited that.
We need to communicate with them. We need to communicate in a way that they can understand and accept. I’m not talking about talking down, just telling the truth in a different way than we have been (which is obviously not working). Maybe we could air PSAs of people who benefit from the ACA, or show images of actual refugees and telling individual stories. Rather than statistics, I believe this will actually be taken in and understood by those we are trying to reach. And this is really what we want. I want to think about this more. I think this can really be done, though.
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