I think you've fallen into the trap of thinking that logical arguments are what shape perceptions, instead of vice-versa. That may be somewhat true for academics, but I don't think it's true for most people, who are more in the "Some things you have to believe to see" camp.
Don't fall into the psychological trap of thinking that most people are like the people you hang around with. They're not. They might as well be a different species. The type of logical discussion taught in the academy is not how those other people operate. In fact, to them logic is unpleasant and irrelevant. That is not going to change before the next election, or go away because it means your whole campaign strategy needs to be rethought from the ground up.
The rest of the USA population does not admire academics and wish they had PhDs too. Get past that error in the model. What your eyes and the daily news tells you is, in fact true - There is NOT a shared value among the general population that education and logic are either important or desired traits. This is hard to accept for academics who are immersed in a world in which those are universal values.
Be pragmatic. Accept empirical data. Count the votes. A campaign based on "facts" and "reasoning" is doomed to fail before it begins. If you can't accept that, let someone else drive.
Someone said once "Man is not a rational animal - he is a rationalizing animal." This is worth some serious pondering.
Put another way -- as you probably have observed but simply cannot accept, there is NO ordering of the "dots" (facts) that will be "connected" in their brains to make a persuasive, perception-altering "case" or "argument." In fact, there is macho pride in who can dismiss the largest fact and keep on trucking. It is not about facts, and it can NEVER be won on the basis of facts and logical arguments.
I think what is at work is more of a flock or swarm peripheral vision effect, where they don't trust their own eyes or judgment, but they DO subliminally perceive and implicitly trust which way the herd or swarm is apparently moving. What counts is "impressions" of attitudes, from as many apparently different sides at once, over and over and over.
No one could make a logical argument that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, and yet over half the American populace believed that (or perceived that to be what everyone thought) on the day we attacked. In this game, however much stress it causes academics, facts are simply irrelevant. Sheer volume of impressions of what "everyone thinks" are all that matter.
Of course, to round that out, a tacit understanding that it is "bad" or traitorous or antisocial to even consider or look at any input from the "other side" helps keep the percentage of supportive impressions high enough to keep the lock in place.
So, in that model of "how things work", volume matters -- volume in terms of number of impressions, and volume in terms of decibels. Facts have negative value. Appeal to facts gets the mental door slammed with disgust at "damn elites trying to make me feel stupid."
It's a sad and depression model, but I submit to those who do work on empirical facts that this model is a pretty good fit for what we see going on around us. I recommend reading "Thank you for smoking" to get a short course in how such flim-flam is applied in practice, since the readership of this column surely reads for information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You_for_Smoking_(novel)
The sober and sad fact is that there are apparently more US voters who watch TV than read (or think) as a basis for their opinions. And at this point they are bonding over shared disdain for elites (aka education, logic, facts, algebra, calculus, big words, complex ideas, etc.)
Back to the point. There is NO set of facts that will crack that lock on their vote. Abandon that approach. Follow the Republican lead and treat American voters as mindless flock animals who sustain on non-verbal peripheral vision clues about where everyone else is and is going.
Sigh.
1 comment:
Your conclusion: „Follow the Republican lead and treat American voters as mindless flock animals who sustain on non-verbal peripheral vision clues about where everyone else is and is going.“ could well sound cynical or depressed. But it isn't.
Jürgen Habermas attempted looked into social communication and found an interesting distinction :
“In strategic action, actors are not so much interested in mutual understanding as in achieving the individual goals they each bring to the situation. Actor A, for example, will thus appeal to B's desires and fears so as to motivate the behavior on B's part that is required for A's success. As reasons motivating B's cooperation, B's desires and fears are only contingently related to A's goals. B cooperates with A, in other words, not because B finds A's project inherently interesting or worthy, but because of what B gets out of the bargain: avoiding some threat that A can make or obtaining something A has promised (which may be of inherent interest to B but for A is only a means of motivating B).
In communicative action, or what Habermas later came to call “strong communicative action” .. .., speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals on the basis of a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy. Whereas strategic action succeeds insofar as the actors achieve their individual goals, communicative action succeeds insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behavior. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement. „
cited from:
Bohman, James, Rehg, William, "Jürgen Habermas", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
While I like this distinction in principle, I also must admit that it doesn't work in practice! Very much as you stated, man isn't designed to be reasonable. Reason is part of our civilization but not “bred in the bone”. Reason works acceptably well in science and technology, but not in our social behavior like politics. So Habermas fails to see (as far as I understand) that any group of people is at risk of finding any absolutely irrational, even mad consensus for actions.
The very basic concept for ethic standards could be “Do no harm” and “You don't have to accept any harm being done to you”. A perfect win-win concept, easy, simple, no more wars, no destructive rivalries, just peaceful, tolerant coexistence! Too nice to be true. NOT the design of our souls. Strong, mainly subconscious emotions are controlling our “rational” thinking.
It took me some time to understand and accept this. Human communication is mostly strategic, consciously so or not, we can't escape.
Lesson learnt, expectations calibrated to what I perceive as reality. Alas, my personal perception of it only...
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