Saturday's Financial Times had an insightful article by Edward Luce on how President Obama is approaching the rowdy healthcare protests. As Luce suggests, "by far the largest chunk (of protesters) know little about the proposed reforms and have no intention of of rectifying their ignorance." A significant proportion of the protesters believe that Obama was born outside of the states, that he is trashing the Constitution, that he intends to take their guns away from them, make everyone support abortion, and most flagrantly, establish death panels to determine whether or not Grandma should receive health services. If you've had speech 101 you know that these are all emotional arguments, completely void of fact-based thinking.
Like Luce, I have no intention of taking a position or arguing the healthcare reform. Instead, I want to focus on Obama's approach to the issue and ask whether, whatever your perspective on healthcare reform, he should use emotion-based or reason-based arguments against protesters who are already convinced that the president is intent on doing them harm. In short, I want to talk about process, not substance.
Luce makes a significant point: "Mr. Obama, along with other educated liberals, shares with the Clintons the belief that the fight is won or lost over the quality of reason." What's clear, however, is that whenever an audience has internalized its perspective, NO AMOUNT OF REASON, will have the slightest impact. As the colorful Luce, puts it, "for all their impact, reasonable people may as well be living on Venus."
What does Luce recommend? Quit trying to reason with the crowds. Tell the story about your grandmother being denied healthcare by the insurance companies when she was dying of cancer. Tell it. And tell it again and again. In the final analysis, the side (insurers, neo-cons, traditional liberals or the president) that identifies with Americans' emotions will get the upper hand. In other words, you're going to have to use emotion to deal with emotion. Reason won't work.
As I reflected on the accuracy of Luce's conclusion, I segued immediately into a totally unrelated issue: the bulk of the Gen-Y, Gen-X workforce seems to be caught up into a highly emotional basis for career decision-making. Wherever I turn I'm faced with the settled conclusion that the best way to make a career decision is to "follow your passion." Whenever I suggest that following your passion is a highly questionable model, I'm met with rejection, turned off and viewed as a visitor from Mars. I seem to make little to no headway with the majority of the population on that subject.
Following Edward Luce and persuasion theory I've decided that in the future the best way to deal with the subject is to relate the truth of the matter in story after story with this single line: "If you follow your passion, you're liable to end up on the streets, jobless and poverty-stricken." There are very few people on God's green acre that will have the good fortune to be able to follow their passion and succeed in life.
The fact of the matter is that if we want a decent income, some job security and a work future, we're going to need to use the gray matter, get as good an education as we can possibly manage, make learning central to our life the rest of our life and make our careers and career changes a strategic decision. LBJ once said the only way to deal with Congress is "continuously, incessantly and without interruption." The only way to succeed in this highly chaotic and volatile 21st century economy is to be sure that we know how to think and that we're thinking "continuously, incessantly and without interruption" about our careers.
Stay tuned.
See also: Gen-Y Squishy Skill #3: Adventurous