Toward the end of episode eight in the third season of Yellowstone, John Dutton (Kevin Costner) says this to his son, Kayce: “In case you haven’t noticed, it (the world) is cruel and uncaring.” And he adds, “you have to be meaner than evil--and still love your family and still enjoy a sunrise.” I could feel my skin crawling, tingling after his words. I understood my rejection immediately, but it took several days to figure out why my emotions were so strong. And why Dutton’s commitment bothered me so much.
It’s not that the words were out of sync with the storyline of the episode or the series. The entire series has been filled with gripping conflicts between good and evil, between protection of the family and property and the attempts to steal the property from the family. Often dripping with brutality. The stories in all three seasons have shown a high degree of consistency and suspense, interlaced with underlying questions about human reality. (Does this actually happen in our world today?) That’s part of the reason the show has kept my interest at very high levels. Obviously, I’m not the only committed viewer. That final episode set a ratings-record with 5.2 million viewers, claiming cable’s #1 spot, in live, same day. If you include the simulcast and encores, the closer drew 7.5M viewers on premiere night. And it also set up the viewer for season four, next year.
More than a good show?
What bugged me so much about that narrative is that it’s reflective of the distrust of the world and the people in it, the background, for example, for our current conspiracy spasm. Both consciously and unconsciously, my person and my vocations have often circled around our trust and distrust of the community and the world—and how profoundly repetitious stories with similar distrusting values impact our relationships, vocations and communities. I don’t think of Dutton’s two sentences as merely a means for sharing information. It’s an arousing story in which we viewers have been conditioned to participate. And it appeals to our feelings rather than to our thinking. That’s what makes it so powerful and seductive, creating my intense emotional response.
Dig into any conspiracy theory and you’ll find believers with shattered views of trust in the world, what Richard Hofstadter famously called "an arena for angry minds."
Stories are the most primal and always the most powerful because they are the basic stuff of learning how to talk—and then how to think. Toddlers learn to talk, building their vocabulary from the brief stories they are read and told. They see actions as stories, not as events. Then, when asked about a friend, school or even a toy, the toddler invariably answers in brief story forms. They don’t see facts or statistics or principles, they see stories. They don’t see toy trucks. They see stories about that truck. Pointing at a “dump truck” for my three-and-a-half-year-old grandson years ago, his response stopped me in my tracks: “Ac-tu-al-ly, it’s an ar-tic-u-la-ted dump truck. It can hold a lot of sand and gravel—and they don’t have to have as many trucks coming for the new building.”
At the other end of the shtick, MBAs from the top schools are taught to tell stories to explain their ideas and commitments. The better politicians have great stories. Recently, I watched Joe Biden telling small-town Minnesota people about growing up in Scranton and not on Park Avenue. And about his Dad losing his job and worrying about food on the table, stories that the people in Germantown, Minnesota, could identify with. Being able to identify with someone else is the core of how you build influence—and relationships. Business executives know that they can’t sell ideas just with statistics. They’ve got to be able to insert their ideas, statistics and proposals into a story. It’s the story that makes the statistics and the idea persuasive. One of my daughters interviewed for a senior management position a dozen years ago in a pharmaceutical firm outside of Boston. She got the job easily. So, she went back to talk to the eight research scientists and execs who interviewed her, one-by-one, to find out why they hired her—a smart move for her future. Each one gave her the same answer: “You’ve got great stories!”
What makes Dutton’s (Costner) narrative exceptionally powerful is that it builds hopefulness in the face of evil. It doesn’t leave the family in a world that is “cruel and uncaring.” It doesn’t leave the audience mired in the throes of the thieves, crooks and murderers. It offers the viewer the sense that out of the Dutton family’s wit, strength and real smarts, they’ll eventually rid themselves of everyone that is attempting to do them in, so they can still “love your family and still enjoy a sunrise.”
Except--that a surprising percentage of people hear only that the world is cruel and uncaring--and remember the evil perpetrated in stories like the Dutton family.
Shattered or hopeful? A predisposition?
Business people talk a lot about trust, but it’s often about a negative relationship—not trusting others. Over more than my fifty years of interviewing, counseling and coaching, the negative side of trust, usually unsolicited, is what comes up in hundreds of conversations. Actually, that’s to be expected. Extensive research by Roy Baumeister of Florida State reveals that bad is stronger than good. “Good” and “bad” are among the first words learned by children (and even by house pets). Events that are valenced negatively (losing money, being abandoned by a friend, etc.) will have a far larger impact on people than positively valenced events of the same type (winning money, gaining friends). Dislike is more powerful than like. Bad events are more powerful than good events. Distrust is more powerful than trust. This does not mean that bad will always triumph over good, spelling doom and misery. Rather, good may prevail over the sheer force of numbers. A great number of good events can overcome the psychological effects of a bad event.
But what’s especially important about the distrust pattern is that it may reflect the innate predisposition of a person. One of the basic issues that impacts development, fulfillment and success in life is whether a person is fundamentally trusting, and not distrustful. There’s plenty of research that reveals that overall, the trusting optimist tends to do better in business than the distrusting pessimist. Of course, you don’t want a team that is composed of all trusting optimists. Trust can become naïve. So sometimes, bad is good--and useful. But for a person to grow, they need to have a fairly optimistic and trustful orientation to life.
So, when I’m coaching, I always listen for a degree of hope and trust in others which can make for effective relationships. And support their own development. That’s because distrust seems to be a predisposition that is ideological with some people, becoming a systematic, interconnected network of beliefs, commitments, values and assumptions that influence how power is maintained, struggled over and given in to. The psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman of the University of Pennsylvania created the term “negativity bias” to reflect their finding that negative events are especially contagious. Of course, no one shares all these characteristics, and they may also harbor some attitudes and behaviors at variance. Yet as a coach when I start spotting some of them, I know I’ll have to make some adjustments to my more easy-going models of coaching. And lower my expectations.
There are a number of issues that suggest a person is not hopeful and trusting about the universe and people. Here are some that send up a red flag for me: overly cautious about personal or organizational change, rarely positive about colleagues and subordinates, pooh-poohs all consultants (usually bringing an honest laugh from me), tends to reject process and/or artifact newness, strongly rule-oriented, fears conflict, withholds critical information, overly left-wing or right-wing political, prefers individual decision-making rather than team decisioning, commonly the “giver” and not the “receiver” in relationships (control-oriented), highly self-protective, consistently focuses on “what’s wrong” and ignores “what’s right” in a situation or a process, rarely initiates conversations, limited self-disclosure—will say little about personal history, and rarely anything about personal attitudes, overly religious—but may or may not talk openly about personal religion.
Of all the cognitive biases that have surfaced over the years, the negative bias probably has the most influence over our lives. Baumeister believes that it is “evolutionarily adaptive” for bad to be stronger than good. He argues that throughout our “evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned were more likely to survive threats and, consequently would have increased the probability of passing it along in their genes.” But no longer are we roaming the savannah, braving the harshest of nature and life on a move. The same instinct that protected us through most of the years of our evolution is now sometimes a drag, threatening our intimate relationships, destabilizing our teams at work and playing havoc with our possibilities for growth and fulfillment.
When I hear different forms of “the world is cruel and uncaring,” I check those very strong emotions, knowing that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it also bends toward justice. So--take that, John Dutton! And yes, I love my family very much and enjoy both the sunrises--and the sunsets. And yeah, one of my fifty-year-old daughters recently told me with laughter that I can be a tough egg (her language was more colorful).