The Other Guy Didn’t Win; You Just Failed to Convince People

In politics, business, love and war, we’re tempted to reduce all conflicts to a winner and a loser.  But that implies one side’s argument (or army) defeated the other soundly.  In reality, the margin between victory and defeat is often just a few votes, dollars or bullets.

Unless you’re a unanimous victor, all being the “winner” means is that you were more effective than your competition.  And in most cases, you were never competing in terms of resources, money or power; you were competing for the understanding and sympathy of the indifferent people caught in the middle.

How did you do that?  By selling your version of reality.

Messaging Is Useless Without Action

One way to summarize America’s two-party political system: liberals tend to see opportunity at every turn, while conservatives tend to see everything that can go wrong.  The truth is somewhere in the middle, but rarely do voters vote down the middle, because a vote down the middle is a vote for the status quo; instead, they vote for (or against) hot-button issues that motivate them to take action.  Whichever party can more effectively convince their constituents that theirs is the more inevitable reality — “but only if (or unless) you take action” — is the party that wins.

True believers would insist that their campaigns / arguments / matters of the heart are won by virtue of them being “right.”

Wrong.

You never need to convince anyone that you’re “right.”  You just need to convince them that the alternative (voting for your opponent, buying your competitor’s product, losing the war, loving someone else more than they love you) will be worse for them in the long run.  Cynical?  Perhaps, but it’s hard to argue with a millennium (or more) of success.

We Already Have Virtual Reality; It’s Called Marriage

In a perfect world, we’d all operate using facts and figures, and everyone would agree about the relative importance of X and the potential dangers of Y.  But in the reality we live in today, no one agrees on anything because my frame of reference is different from yours, and so on to infinity.  Doubt it?  Think about the word “boat.”  I guarantee you that if we each drew what we were thinking about, neither of us was picturing the same thing.  (Then realize the difference if I say “ship,” or “vessel.”  If common language is this divisive, it’s amazing any two people are ever on the same page.)

So the next time you’re debating politics with friends, arguing with a client or fighting with your spouse, stop and examine the situation impartially.  More often than not, you’ll discover that the disagreement has nothing to do with which side is “right,” but with which side is more afraid of what might happen if ___.  Are those fears rational?  Are the solutions practical?  Neither of those answers matters; given our linguistic differences, it’s doubtful you’d ever agree 100% even if you both said the exact same thing.

What does matter is convincing the other person that your point of view is more likely to occur.  Because hope is a noble campaign slogan, but befriending the least of all evils is a far more realistic path to success.

Tags: audience, common sense, ethics, honesty, language, perception, politics, Sociology