Have you ever tried to lose weight? It can be tough. It requires a lot of motivation to stick to a diet and go to the gym. Have you ever decided to get your finances in order and make a budget and stop spending and cut up the credit cards? That can be tough as well. Sometimes we get out papers and books and write down our goals for calories or dollars and we figure that if we just understand enough about budgeting or exercise we will be more successful.
Motivation does not come from thinking. Advertisers know this. You don’t normally buy Brand X instead of Brand Y because of all that deductive reasoning going on. We buy things based on feelings. Motivation comes from emotion.
Dave Ramsey spends his days helping people get out of debt and get their finances together. He includes a lot of good logical information on how best to accomplish the goal of being debt-free and building wealth. But he also repeatedly acknowledges that all of that knowledge will not do anybody any good without motivation and intensity. You have to be “sick and tired of being sick and tired”.
Once you reach the point where you are sick enough of the status quo that you have a gut-level feeling strong enough to fuel your motivation, then you will take the actions you need to take to change things. If you have more than a few pounds to lose or you have a really deep financial hole to crawl out of, you will need to maintain that emotion and motivation for a while, and that can be a challenge.
It is now over a week since our presidential election, and our national emotions are still running very high. All of that emotion is still motivating people to action, but there is no longer any action to take. The election is over but the emotions remain, and it will take them a while to fade.
Politicians understand the way to motivate people just as well as advertisers do. People act based on emotions, not necessarily logic. To motivate people to get up off of the couch and go to the ballot box, or to hold signs or knock doors, you need to evoke emotions. And those emotions have to be maintained over the course of a long campaign.
Love is an emotion. Sadness is an emotion. But love and sadness are not the most effective emotions to use to get people to act. Much more effective emotions are anger and fear. Anger and fear are more powerful motivators and can be maintained for a longer period of time. Jealousy can be effective as well. Politicians have become masters at evoking anger and fear and jealousy and we have been bombarded by their commercials for months.
Look around you. Anger, fear, and jealousy surround us, and we should not be the least bit surprised. What would be surprising would be if the conflict ended immediately following the election. It just doesn’t work like that.
Do I understand why people are very afraid? Why people are sobbing and angry and fearful? Not from an intellectual perspective, no. But from an emotional perspective it makes perfect sense. In order to motivate them they had to be told the entire world would collapse if they lost the election. It will take people a while to realize that they were played; or at least their emotions were played with.
The right, despite winning, is not immune to the effects either. We have witnessed a lot of unpleasantness on both sides, and it likely would have been the case had the other side won, just with roles reversed. Those emotions, which were stoked to a red-hot, fever pitch by politicians, do not just suddenly go away.
The media is not helpful. They need viewers, and ratings rise and fall based on the same emotions used by advertisers and politicians. The media needs divisiveness. They feed off of it and into it. If you are trying to bring people together and lower tensions you are fighting an uphill battle.
I have been reflecting on the election and I believe there is a common theme that I heard from both sides. I think I heard a very solid message that there should be no special treatment for anyone. Those on the right were unhappy that Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for actions that would have landed other people in jail. Those on the left were outraged that Donald Trump would claim that his status would allow him to grope women.
We have been taught to demonize one another. Whether the topic is race or gender or religion or economic status, we have been taught that other people who are not like us are bad people, and guilty by association. Muslims are to be feared. White people are racists. Men are pigs. The wealthy are exploiting people and the unions are corrupt. Hispanics are lazy and uneducated.
I did some flying last week and could not work out direct flights so I spent some time sitting in airports. I found myself just observing people. There was nothing unusual, just people buying tickets and boarding planes and picking up bags. People were making their way to seats and stowing luggage and eating and staring at cell phones.
People were nice to one another. They were polite and they talked and laughed and helped one another and took turns and smiled. They thanked each other and everyone went about their business while respecting others. I am sure if you head out to your local mall right now you will see similar behavior, because there was nothing unusual about it.
MOST PEOPLE ARE GOOD PEOPLE. The vast majority of us treat people with respect and do the right things and are not obnoxious or rude. As we go about our lives, complaining about all of the chaos in the world and lamenting the fact that people are such idiots we are surrounded by people who are NOT idiots.
Much of the rhetoric involves the idea that certain groups of people are “taking advantage” of the rest of us and getting “special treatment”. Men have male privilege and whites have white privilege. Blacks and women get special consideration when getting hired. Unions want special treatment. Seniors feel they should get special treatment because of their age. Gays and Muslims need special rules as well, right?
And in order to manipulate our economy in certain directions (all decided by politicians) we need to give special treatment to some companies, and some industries, over others. We need to subsidize solar energy and penalize coal. We have to protect the jobs at Boeing. For some reason we need a little tax on concrete. Special treatment.
If I suggest getting rid of ALL special treatment for everyone across the board, many would oppose that idea. They will defend the special treatment. They will tell you it is necessary and it would be terrible to change it. You see, everyone likes their little special arrangements. It is the other guy’s stuff that offends them.
The poor folks out there who are so very frightened and angry are entitled to their emotions, but I would politely suggest they need to dial it down a little. The sky is not falling. For example, Gay Marriage is not going away; Donald Trump has called the issue “settled”. We also have an ongoing dialogue in this country about race and gender which needs to continue but nobody should be in any fear of government thugs coming to kill black or transgender people.
The media and politicians don’t want you to know this, but we actually agree on a great deal. Even the most contentious of issues have areas of common ground. But we live in echo chambers and we develop blind spots that will not allow us to see the problems in our own views. What’s more, we don’t want to speak out for fear that we will be seen as one of “them”, so we all appear to be reinforcing one another.
The Democrats are being forced to face some tough issues here. The losing side always has to do some introspection to see what went wrong. I think this is a very good thing, but hopefully they will take the blinders off and really, truly look at their ideas, and not just their tactics. It is easy to say we should have spent more time in this state or that one, or with one demographic or another. Tactics have to be considered but if it stops there nothing is learned.
The Republicans, sadly, will likely do no navel-gazing since they won the election. That is too bad, because it is badly needed. Obviously there were many who stood up and opposed the nominee, but those views will likely be marginalized now.
I should point out that #NeverTrump people have their own blind spot to overcome. There are going to be a number of good things that come from a Trump presidency, and to fail to acknowledge them is to fail to acknowledge your own blind spot.
Our new president is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. I am not a fan of pragmatism but we will now have a president who will do what he thinks will be most effective at the moment, and sometimes that will please me and sometimes it will not. He is not a conservative or a libertarian and so we will have to examine each new position that arises.
Those on the left should note that our pragmatist, somewhat Machiavellian President obviously said what he had to say to get elected. He is clearly already backing away from much of the rhetoric he used to get elected, from Obamacare to prosecuting Hillary to building fences instead of walls, it is clear that many of those words were merely triggers used to get elected. I suspect you are going to get much more of what you want than you ever expected.
I would ask both sides to consider dialing back both the emotions and the rhetoric. Republicans would be wise both tactically and strategically to stop insulting and attacking Democrats and liberals and instead to reach out and calm their fears and reassure them that we are all Americans. Democrats would be wise to do the same, and to quit stirring the pot quite so much.
I am not telling anyone not to defend ideas or to compromise on principles. What I am saying is that we do not need to spend so much time attacking other people or groups of people. If we want to talk about immigration or health care we can do so and still be polite and still be friends. But as soon as we start talking about how stupid libtards or neocons are, we are making things worse, not better.
And do me a favor. Turn off the TV from time to time and put down that phone (now that you are done reading this).
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