What's on Offer?

The thing that’s on offer—the thing that’s being negotiated—is rarely the thing that we are fighting over.

Our conflicts rarely get to the core truth of what needs to be resolved. This is why management of a recurring conflict situation is a better posture toward conflict than one of trying to persist in getting to a resolution. It’s also another reason why we are all terrible negotiators.

The issues that we are fighting over—and the options for resolution that should be on offer—must be sold, managed, persuaded, and packaged for other people’s consumption in the way that they want them to be on offer.

Not the way you want it to be offered.

This core truth is what unites marketing and conflict management. Human beings like being persuaded, marketed to, and talked to, in very specific ways, and if you violate conventions in the pursuit of getting to a deeper truth, you run several risks, but the biggest ones are as follows:

Being unheard.

Being ignored.

Being unfairly (or fairly) maligned.

Being marginalized when another more persuasive party comes along.

The counter to the question of “What’s on offer?” is the equally compelling question “What’s the truth of what we are fighting over?”

Liars' Poker

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a deeply pessimistic Russian writer with a streak of Orthodox Christianity that he could never reconcile with the 19th-century ideals of a mythical European rationalist utopian project, was also an inveterate gambler. This habit gave him a unique view on risk, loss, victory, and the thrills that can only emanate from the depths of resentment, envy, and anger. It also gave him insight into how individuals lie, how we lie to each other in social relationships, and how even the apparatus of the state can be corrupted by lying.

Dostoyevsky wrestled with all of this in a time before Freud’s insights into human psychology really got a hold of the Victorian mindset. His writing was positioned during a transitory era in the mid-19th century, before what we now know as “the modern world” began truly seeking the transcendent. Mostly self-published, Dostoyevsky was the anti-Tolstoy, penning The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and, notably, Notes From Underground.

The problem Dostoyevsky put his finger on in Notes From Underground, a rambling volume profiling the resentments of a dyspeptic and unreliable narrator, is that, while the individual liar needs a society to operate in (1984), a series of distractions to fool and narcotize himself and others (Brave New World), and the totalizing force of the state to ensure no one gets out of line and maintains the absurdity of the lies (Invitation to a Beheading), the liar can never fully escape the one person he hates and fears the most—himself.

And, since the moral courage to face himself is lacking, the liar–gambling on escape, social control, or command structures to do the work he cannot fully do himself–instead of abandoning his lies, spins the roulette wheel of philosophy and lands on nihilism, existential dread, or even a species of pet rational cynicism. Dostoyevsky knew that moral courage was the antidote to despair in a modern rationalist world, but he couldn’t figure out how to get people from the comfort of their intractable lies, or their adoption of alternative facts to soothe their moral turpitude, to the uncomfortable place where ultimate, knowable Truth resides.

We have the same problem with liars playing poker in our era. Except the liars are playing poker at a technological, social, and cultural scale that would be unfathomable to Dostoyevsky. And the problem can only be solved by each of us, individually, adopting the moral courage to say the Truth. The economist, author, and researcher Thomas Sowell once noted that, “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”

There’s no surer way to spread panic among a multitude of liars than to bet on the Truth.

The Pitch

Everybody pitches.

From the moment we are born until the Grim Reaper comes for us, we are all selling, and buying, everything, all the time. Which is to say, humans are consistently seeking to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of the people around us. And they are doing the same to us. These acts of buying and selling, from the womb to the tomb, are a huge part of what make human beings social animals.

Even in our oldest stories, humans are documented as trying to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of transcendence itself. But why? What is the meaning behind our acts of selling? And why do we struggle to think deeply about what all this might mean at all? There are no philosophers of sales. And there are no philosophy of persuasion courses available on the Internet or via higher education. Sure, you can get all the instructions on the mechanics of selling and buying, but the reason for doing the mechanics in the first place?

Well. The shelf is thin on volumes of books at that end of it.

There are two reasons (among many) why humans don’t think much about why we sell and buy ideas, opinions, perspectives, products, services, problems, and their solutions to and from each other. The first reason is that we fear that thinking too much about the philosophy, the “why,” behind the behavior of selling itself might cause the “magic” of whatever approach we’ve been successful with to go away. This is nonsense. But it’s on par with the object permanence nonsense we genuinely believe when we play peek-a-boo as nine-month-old infants.

The second reason we don’t explore the philosophy of why we are compelled to sell to other people–and why we allow their selling to work, or not, on us–is because we don’t want to think too deeply about how really gullible we are. This is disturbing to us because it puts paid to our deeply held conviction that we have autonomous free will, independent agency, and the ability to make decisions without other people. Now, let me be clear: I believe in free will. And I believe in the power of humans to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of other humans to surrender their free will in service of themselves, others, or even something greater than themselves.

Think carefully before you pitch to others.

The Myth of the City

According to the writer and creator of the show, Yellowstone, he was told repeatedly by Hollywood executives when he was initially shopping the pitch of creating a show where most of the action occurred on a ranch in rural Montana, that, “We won’t pick up a show that pitches stories from rural areas. It’s been that way since the 1970s. We only pick up stories that we can market to the urban areas of the country.”

If this is an accurate anecdote, and memories of pitch meetings in Hollywood are notoriously full of holes, and Hollywood hagiography is its own form of storytelling, what it means is that for at least three generations in American popular culture, the myth of the city as the only place where “the action is” has been actively marketed over the reality we all live with in our lives.

That’s not to say that urban stories and myths aren’t part of the fabric of the American myth. They clearly are, all the way back to the Boston Tea Party. But it does open the door to thinking critically about how much of the post-modern mythos about the sexiness of urban living is just really marketing by Hollywood executives with a directive to follow from their immediate bosses.

The Rights You Have

You don’t have a right to the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education you think you deserve.

You don’t have the right to lecture to the people who have earned the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education you think they don’t deserve, about what they can or can’t do with the fruits of their labor.

If you don’t like the way in which the eponymous “they” earned the market, earned the attention, earned the money, earned the status, or earned the education, then you have two options: 1) Change the systems, or 2) See the first option.

Changing people might feel sexier, but changing systems is the real work.

But if you’re not willing to work to achieve the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education that “they” earned in the first place in order to outcompete “them, I can see how it would be more attractive to complain about the outcomes of a system that would take work to change.

Anonymous Verification

The marketer and author, Seth Godin, made a point years ago, in either a book of his or on his long-running blog site, that sets the table for my observations today, “No society ever survived anonymous feedback.”

He was right, of course.

And as our national and global public discourse has declined into tribalism, violence, and polarization, calls for identifying people verifiably as people for the purposes of policing online discourse have increased.

The problem with verification of “humans as humans” and not “humans as bots” is not a “free speech” smothering problem.

People are free to speak (or write), but they have never been free from the consequences of such speech or written words. That’s why the 1st Amendment in the US Constitution is followed closely by the 2nd Amendment.

The problem with the verification of “humans as humans” for the purposes of making humans behave in their online communication is that humans have been shaped in their behaviors, communication patterns, and appetites by the Internet, as much as the Internet has been shaped by them. Problems with anonymity were just the tip of the iceberg in human communication and behavioral challenges with this new technology.

I am not opposed to human verification to police toxic commentary on the Internet. But I am opposed to verifying humans as humans as a shortcut to the hard work of mitigating behavior that is as much psychological and spiritual as it is material and emotional.

The problem lies not in the Internet, the trolls, or even the bots, dear Internet Commentator, but in ourselves.

And if we want society to survive, neither anonymity nor verification is going to serve well as cudgels to get humans to behave and communicate more humanely.

Unreliable Narrators

Now that we all live in a culture where most (if not many) objective truths have been reduced to subjective feelings, we navigate a globalized environment where we are all a species of unreliable narrators.

Sure, we can “know” people relationally and determine the reliability of their closely-held narratives, but increasingly even that is becoming a problem at the localized level, which is the level most of us still live at.

Another, simpler way of putting this is, we are all liars. And in a world full of liars, the most dangerous and courageous person is the one who insists, despite the conditions surrounding them, that 1). there is objective truth, 2). humans, no matter their background, education, or temperament, can know what that truth is, and 3). that subjective feelings about objective truths represent the beginnings of rebellion against the order of reality itself.

It’s no wonder that unreliable narrators–what we used to call liars–are proliferating faster than we can address their lies. The problem, dear Horatio, lies in us, not in the stars.

Secret Kings and Their Marketing Teams

No one is convinced that the social reformer, regardless of ideological, political, or social position, is advocating for all of the “social reform” they’re advocating for, out of some sense of humane magnanimity.

Just as no one is convinced that the businessman, regardless of commitment to sales, investing, or making profit, is advocating for all of the “capitalism” they’re selling and marketing for, out of some desire to destroy, despoil, or ruin.

However, because creatives tend to be socially minded rather than business-minded, they tend to get the last word in describing, defining, and making the myths that the audience believes about not only their motives, but also the motives of their opposites.

Messing With The Clocks

The original reasons for instituting a time change with the clocks may have been stated as being for farmers and agricultural producers to get more done. . However, in the United States, we have passed through the practical reasons for time changes and now are into the more insidious reasons. . Controlling a population is about more than just about launching marketing or propaganda efforts to change minds. It’s also about changing behaviors that people do.

Olestra, GLP-1's, Nietzsche, and the Continued Search for a Chemical Solution to Human Nature

Two things occur to me:

1). People in online popular culture no longer talk about “body positivity” now that GLP-1 drugs are readily available and have proven to be somewhat effective. However, I remember the coming and going of Olestra, so I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

2). There is never going to be a chemical solution to the pile of psychological, emotional, and spiritual factors that cause the differing disorders, pathologies, habits, tendencies, and tics that humans experience as a result of living in a fallen world.

Of course, I am trade-off positive rather than solution positive, because the abyss of human nature is as deep and dark as the abyss Nietzsche rhapsodized about in his various mad warnings.