Activists Hurt Their Causes

There’s a study I want to point out, but before we get there, I want to help you understand the point we are about to make viscerally. So let me start with a couple questions.

If I told you that the divorce system, indeed all of family law, is biased against fathers and needs reform, would you be interested in hearing what I have to say? If I then outlined this bias and I point out to you instances where this has caused the courts to award children to unfit or abusive mothers over the objections of excellent fathers, would you consider my suggestions for changing the law to correct those problems? Probably, right?

Now let me change this scenario somewhat. Assume again that I want to tell you about problems I see with the state of family law and the reforms I think are needed. But this time, let me tell you why I care. Well, I was CHEATED by that very system!! See, my evil ex-wife and her rotten lawyer cheated me. They used dirty tricks put into the law by man-hating feminists who hate men and want to use the law to grab political power for womyn! It's an outrage! I’ve actually formed a group called “F**kWOMYN” to advance my goals, and you should join. In fact, I can't see a reason why you wouldn't join. You're not one of THEM are you?! And while I’m at it, I should point out that rape is a made-up crime, that it’s a biological fact that women are liars, and that my ex-wife is a lazy whore.

Still want to listen? Hell no, right?

Before I continue, let me point out that none of this is true: never been married, never been through a divorce or adoption, don't even practice that kind of law - it's brutal. There is some anti-male bias in the law, but I don't care. So why did I mention any of this? I wanted to show you how quickly I can lose you on an emotional level with my own conduct. In the first paragraph, I come across as rational, informed and dispassionate. That approach puts you at ease and makes you more than willing to listen to what I am concerned about. But in the second paragraph, I send up red flags all over the place that give you the screaming willies. For one thing, it’s clear that I am biased. That wipes out the trust factor and now everything I say goes through your bias filter. For another, I demonstrate a lack of judgment. For example, the name of my organization calls into question my ability to function in human society. And then there’s the real killer: it’s clear that I’m obsessed, and that will send people running because it scares us.

Why does obsession scare us? Obsession is seen as dangerous because it causes people to act irrationally. It makes them blind to reality, immune to fact or logic, and it strips them of their judgment both in terms of what is important but also in terms of what is appropriate. Obsessed people lie, cheat, stalk girlfriends and shoot up offices. But even when it doesn’t go that far, obsession is super unpleasant to be around. People who are obsessed talk about the same thing over and over. They are blind to the gaping holes in what they believe, yet they demand absolute conformance to their crazy views. They are obnoxious, conspiratorial, and hateful. We flee them.

So what does this have to do with anything?

There have been a series of studies lately that reached an interesting set of conclusions. In essence, the studies sought to determine how activists were perceived by the public. They studied feminists and environmentalists, but the same holds true of any activist group... like Tea Party types, like talk radio, and like my divorce reform guy above. And what they found was that the public holds overwhelmingly negative views of activists. Even more interestingly, they discovered that activists actually make people less likely to adopt behaviors advocated by the activists. In other words, activists actually turn people off of their cause.

To test this, they gave people an essay on recycling and a biography of the author. One group was told the author was just a regular person without much in the way of environmentalist credentials. Another group was told that the author was engaged in low-key fundraising to help environmentalist causes. The third group was given the biography of a hardcore activist who stages protests and the such. The result was that the people who were told the author was the hardcore activist were significantly more hostile to recycling than the other two groups. In other words, knowing that the author was an aggressive activist actually made people act in the reverse manner to what the activist wanted.

Now, there are some weaknesses with this study, but years of seeing people react very poorly to activists tells me they are correct. All that screaming, table pounding and demands that the rest of the world adopt your obsession right now!! just turns people off and makes them root against you.

This is a key lesson that unfortunately is lost on the people who need to hear it: the more obsessed you act, the more you lose people. Unfortunately, just like other activists before them, our fringe has no clue how they are perceived. They mistake their obsession for righteousness and they wrongly think the public admires them. . . they don’t, they feel the same way you felt when you read that second paragraph above: they get queasy, they look for the exit, and they actively hope that the crazy doesn’t get what he wants. That’s the lesson of this study and that's how life plays out time and again.

Why this matters can be related to a quote from Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck famously said, “Politics is the art of the possible.” That is truly insightful. It’s also shocking, if you think about it. Bismarck was known as “the Iron Chancellor” and was essentially German’s first dictator. On paper, he is what the fringe argues we need right now. Yet, even in rigid, dictatorial Imperial Germany Bismarck couldn't just get his way; he could only get “what was possible.” And by that, he meant what the public was willing to give him. In fact, I would argue that Bismarck’s quote is actually incomplete. What he should have said is that “Politics is the art of shifting the landscape to make your goals possible.” That's what Reagan did... he took what he could get and he kept the ball moving and, in the process, he kept winning more and more.

What both Bismarck and Reagan understood, which ideologues/activists don’t get, is that the public is self-interested... they don’t care about crusades or ideology, they care about their own lives. As a result, the public fears those who scream about changing things and it despises troublemakers who want to disrupt the order they've established in their lives in the name of ideology. What this tells us is that the fringe is doing it all wrong. The ONLY way to win the public is to take what the public will give you right now, to use that opportunity to show that you are responsible and pose no threat to them, and then to ask them to give you a little more. Demanding everything at once is a nonstarter. And executing leaders for failing to deliver the impossible, screaming about traitors, reveling in purity and crippling the government are guaranteed to turn off the public.

The left has learned this lesson and they have a century of gains to show for it. Little by little, they’ve accepted bastardized versions of things they’ve wanted and then they went back to pushing to un-bastardize them once the public realized the world didn’t end. It has only been when they tried to push too far too fast that they experienced a backlash. The right needs to learn the same thing. The public will give you want you want a little at a time, but if you demand everything at once, you will get nothing. And if you act like an obsessed weirdo, the public will intentionally go the other way.

And if you think about it, you know this is right. When you see a child throw a tantrum, a teenager demand that the world should revolve around them, a friend obsess about his model train hobby, a jilted spouse complain about their ex, a liberal environmentalist protesting before a chemical plant... do you think, "Wow, they real mean it! There must be something to this!" No way. You think they're crazy and you want to get away from them. So why do you think the public will follow you when you do it?

Anyway, let me point out that this does not mean that you have to give up your principles. It just means you need to be sane enough to realize that you have sell people on your principles a little bit at a time, and that you can't act deranged and obsessed and expect people to adopt your ideas. It's time to learn the art of the soft push and to stop screaming like mental patients.