Yeah, I’m pretty fed up with talk about the future these days. Effective communication is crucial if we want to start talking about our collective future as the future. Not as an infinite set of warnings. Not as something a politician can fix in days. But as a future that we can have a positive (but not utopian) vision of. That we can make our way toward.
There is something magical about feeling you’re heading the right direction. People stay the course for a long time if they feel like there’s progress toward the things they value.
The stock market, with its focus on quarterly earnings and never-ending growth is one of the things that basically fucks the future.
It wasn’t always that way. There used to be balance in what was expected of publicly listed companies and the governments entrusted to regulate them. There was a balance that included responsibility and good citizenship. People may not remember that the current unbalanced system was created bit by insidious bit over decades by people who believed in things that just aren’t true. People who believed that the long-term future just doesn’t matter.
The stock market does matter. It matters a whole hell of a lot. Money matters. Right up to the point where a person or society has enough resources to live without fear or dire poverty. Everything after that has rapidly diminishing returns.
Effective Communication – Not Political Parties
Strangely, a lack of effective communication about the future isn’t really a political issue of one party versus another party. Both parties portray the future in horrifically gloomy terms (if people won’t do things their way), while Trump lies about a delusionally rosy future as often as he lies about his delusionally rosy accomplishments of the present. Both parties portray people in the other party as terrible terrible people.
Meanwhile people in the main political parties in the US volunteer in blue states and red states. People across the country do what they can to make the future better in concrete ways, and they try to teach their children to do so (especially Gen X, by the way).
Politicians these days, however, talk as though nobody (especially in the other political party) ever does anything good and the only route to progress is annihilating the people who aren’t on their side. Politicians, though, do what they do and think what they think because others have already thought and said them. If every non-politician said ‘the cost of living needs to be higher’ then politicians would say that too. Politicians are followers – because people are followers.
If regular people, and television showrunners, and podcasters, and media pundits, and university professors, and bloggers, and preachers and bartenders and baseball coaches and famous athletes started ditching the dystopia talk altogether and started talking about how to create a better world without reference to the current hatreds – politicians would talk that way too.
Just because some people accidentally on purpose got everyone in the habit of talking dystopian trash – doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. It doesn’t.
So – if we start talking about living well in the future, instead of living in a dystopia where our only pleasures come from whacking the zombies of the ‘other side’ – what then?
What does it mean to live well? Living well with others? Strong communities? Does it mean living well with nature and its ecosystems? An emphasis on culture? Does it mean spirituality and spiritual traditions?
Simple Questions Are Key
Which means – we need to ask the simple questions simply. And listen to the answers. What do people want? What’s more important to them? This or that? Things better or worse than last year? In what ways exactly? Questions are crucial to effective communication.
Simple questions are not how questions – they are what questions. They’re not ‘should we hire more police officers to reduce crime – or invest more in after school programs?’ That’s a how question – a ‘how should we reduce crime’ question. A what question is – what do you need to feel safe in your home and community environments?
People come up with interesting and effective hows – when they are clear on the nuances of the whats. The current norms don’t allow people to get even close to the nuances of their whats.
Broad terms like ‘gender equality’ or ‘innovation’ or ‘infrastructure’ can facilitate seeming agreement. But what exactly does gender equality entail? Innovation? Is it always good? What infrastructure exactly is deemed important? And so on.
So simpler, more concrete and granular questions can help us collectively drill down to what we think is important. For example, should one person get paid more than another for doing the same work at the same level of competence just because they’re a man or belong to a certain race? Answering that question doesn’t create gender equality. But it does let people know what kind of concrete hardships people face in real life.
It is often said that people respond to individual situations (a starving orphan in Syria) differently than abstract situations (foreign aid for war-torn areas). Simple questions activate people’s natural moral instincts. As opposed to their natural instincts to get bored AF when people spout academic techno-statistical-wonk babble at them.
Just Saying No to Drama and Manipulation
Ideally, we’d ask the simple questions without drama and manipulation. Often. So that we collectively adjust the route to our desired destination based on the prevailing traffic. Like normal people do in life. That’s what effective communication does.
When people indicate that things are worse (because sometimes they are), it’s important to note what exactly is worse. The things that have gotten worse for an individual may seem trivial (no longer able to pursue higher education due to increased childcare obligations) but may actually indicate bigger more important areas to address (e.g., lack of childcare options).
To give an example, during the pandemic, when people worked from home, a lot of women had more freedom and flexibility to deal with their young children. Now that companies like The Walt Disney Company require the overwhelming majority of time be spent in a non-home office, people’s lives may have gotten worse.
The question for The Walt Disney Company would be what is the justification or purpose of the in-office policy? Successful or not? How measured? If the justification is that people are ‘more creative’ when in the office, what’s the measurement of creativity? Is it a bottom-line issue, long-term viability issue, an organizational culture issue, an executive’s preference to feel ‘creative’ when people are around him telling him how creative he is?
Then the question becomes – what’s more important – the ‘creativity’ or the ability to take care of your children? Both? Do people think there should be a balance?
This approach is obviously quite different from allowing entities to gain so much size and power that they just dictate to everyone how life should be lived. As a different approach, it will have advantages and disadvantages. But it’s not any stranger than the system we have now, where a few individuals make random and often irrational decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Finding out what’s actually going on in people’s lives – may reduce the ‘twitter effect’. People have a tendency to follow each other in rather curious directions based on whatever seems to be currently trending – like how things blow up on Twitter. For example, the idea that crime got worse recently, with organized retail thefts and various disturbances catching attention, got a big boost from the twitter effect.
Effective Communication – Grounded in Reality
Was crime worse? Statistically there were ups and downs. But asking people about their own personal experiences of crime victimization and fear is different from finding out what’s trending on Twitter. It helps ground people in their lived realities instead of the oddly false and seductive world of media doom-washing. Again, this is what effective communication does; it grounds people in reality.
Another example – the current US president has a stated goal to make America’s seafood production great. To that end (perhaps), he’s allowing fishing in a formerly protected area. This is the kind of situation that leads to competing ‘how’ narratives. Some experts say that opening the area leads to the collapse of the fished species, KO’ing US future seafood production. Others say ‘nah, lemme fish there now! Moola moola.’ Or stuff like that.
If you ask people what do they want more – protected areas and life in the ocean – or fishing in those areas, you’ll get more idiosyncratic responses. Like allowing some fishing or setting strict limits or beefing up efforts to catch poachers, etc. Many people may not care. Some may not think it’s worth protecting the ocean area. You don’t know what people truly care about until you ask.
This is tough. Because people may not care about what you think they should.
Not to mention, individual opinions are way different from lobbyist opinions. Doing what the collective wants instead of what the lobbyists want would be such a drastic change in US politics that people might not even recognize their government any more.
Say what – a government by, for, and of the people!!! Instead of a government by, for, and of the deep-pocket lobbyists???
There aren’t that many Americans who realize that in 1959, when America was supposedly great – there were hardly any lobbyists at all. Yup, the current corruption is waaaaaay younger than the US itself. It’s even younger than the boomers that are still booming.
People Are Not Statistics
Some questions about how people are doing are easy to measure using existing tools. Like the levels of household debt. The vast economics statistical complex already measures that. There’s plenty of effective communication about these kinds of aggregate statistics.
What isn’t given as much attention is the subjective experience of that debt. Does it feel fine because it’s all mortgage debt paid off in easily digestible chunks that build long-term wealth? Or does it feel horrible because it’s part of a vicious cycle of payday loans?
The answers to these kinds of questions may be quite different in the US north than the Midwest or the US south.
What about housing? There are, and have been, housing crises around the world (cuz capitalism misallocates resources) but what is it actually like? Are housed people in housing that’s good enough? More than good enough? Is there too much luxury housing and not enough not non-luxury housing? (Yes, cuz capitalism and its misallocation of resources.) Where do people want to live and with who?
How about healthcare? There is a stupendously ginormous healthcare industrial complex in the US. There’s research and grants and fancy machines and experimental drugs that cost $6 billion dollars a year per prescription (okay, slight exaggeration), and a never-ending parade of new things to worry about and more vaccines to get and more things for GPs to track and oh my god it never ends in America with the friggin drug commercials. Never fucking ends.
But how much of this is what people need? Is it possible, just possible, that what people need is more basic stuff and less never ending fancy shit and medical errors being one of the leading causes of death in the US? Yes, and we don’t have the basics – cuz capitalism and its misallocation of resources. So what if we asked people what they actually think they need? What would happen? Probably not what anybody who’s in for big bucks in the current system would want. But I’m inclined to say tough shit to that because I’m as tired as anybody else of Big Pharma and all the rest of it.
People would have to know that the answers they give to the questions they’re asked aren’t going to put them at risk. And that the information they are given about the results of the questions aren’t a set of lies. Which means – and this is the difficult part – lying by public communicators has got to get a whole lot less popular.
Which means, and this may be the hard part as well, the American people have got to start demanding the truth and to stop putting up with the lies.
A Positive Future Begins with the Truth
In other words, and yes this is excruciatingly simple – effective communication about the future starts with the truth. Who’d a thunk?
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