Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

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Why We Cling to Magical Thinking

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , ,

With group fantasies, the world always makes sense.  Without them we would have to live closer to the uncertainties of incomplete insight.

These times remind us that millions of Americans have easily succumbed to magical thinking, to the embarrassment of much of the nation.  Magical thinking happens when a view is reinforced more by others than hard fact. This happens in every conceivable realm of American life: medicine and vaccines, allegations of “voter fraud,” rumors about celebrities, and—of course—our national politics.

There is a clear and convincing explanation for this collective response to not notice the obvious. We can continue to call the determination to believe a falsehood “magical thinking.” But a better term is “fantasy chaining.”  Let me explain.

Years ago, social scientist Robert Bales noted that groups of people put together in a room to solve a problem often reach a moment when there is a convergence of views around a preferred narrative. In many cases folks in the group didn’t have the facts or knowledge to make a judgement, but they had the support of other like-minded people around them. Think of a jury reaching a judgment on a case based on a shared prejudice. From this and other observations, Bales developed the idea of Interaction Process Analysis to track this convergence of opinions, building in part on the work of Sigmund Freud work in The Interpretation of Dreams.  It was good, but not quite clear enough. And any theory resting on Freudian assumption needs a lot more grounding.

Years later communication theorist Ernest Boorman at the University of Minnesota refined Bales’ ideas into a theory Fantasy Theme Analysis. His work created a convincing model that was finally up to speed and amazingly predictive.

Basically, Boorman acknowledged that—in the absence of good information—we tend to rely on members of our reference group and our natural compulsion to spin narratives that allow us to move us from tentative claims like “I suspect” to the certainties of “I know.”  That’s what a fantasy theme makes possible. He also noted the obvious: that it is easy for group fantasies to “chain out” to others with similar views.

Fantasy theme analysis helps us understand the contagion that happens when incomplete information combines with our hard-wired impulses to see the world in sets of self-contained stories. Each comes with with actors, motivations, preferred narratives, and final outcomes. We hate incomplete narratives, as when there is an airplane accident caused by bad weather.  So we are happy to construct our own secondary narratives, regardless of what solid evidence might oblige us to believe. We want to have human agents in the picture and at least partly responsible.

Here’s another example I have used in a text and my classes. I was sitting in my office one day in the 80s with a copy of the New York Times opened up on my desk. A colleague dropped by and, at the same time, we both noticed the paper’s front-page picture of the new Soviet version of a space shuttle. The Buran space craft looked exactly like the American version. Same wing shape. Same color. Same size. And without missing a beat we both blurted out the view that “they must have stolen the American design.” End of story. We “knew” it and we were ready to fill in the blanks. The similarity of the shape was enough to accept the fantasy of a theft of our plans.  All the while, we pretty much ignored the physics of space flight, which mandates similar design parameters for any earth-to-space vehicle.

With group fantasies, the world always makes sense.  Without them, we would have to live with the continuous uncertainties mandated by incomplete information. In my field there is a Latin phrase to describe humans as homo narrans: the species that tells stories. That is our priority. Truth is far back in the pack. Tacts are optional and often downright inconvenient for humans. It feels better and it is much easier to bolster each other’s fantasies.

In time, and the sooner the better, more Americans will rejoin the reality-based world.

Top Photo Credit: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/photos/background”>Background photo created by valeria_aksakova – www.freepik.com</a>

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The Conciliation Imperative

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[Another national election is taking place. It’s a good time to remember that we will have to get beyond celebrating the unilateralism that has dominated too much American rhetoric. The challenger this time seems more open to seeking common ground with political foes. But the President still seems locked into a binary mindset dominated by the abuse of other Americans as scapegoats. He appears to not have the emotional intelligence to change. And it is our collective problem that this characteristic is one source of his popularity.]

Lawrence Wright’s book on the intense negotiations that led to the historical Camp David Accords is a good indicator of what is so frequently missing in our politics. Thirteen Days in September (2014) documents the efforts of President Jimmy Carter to find a way out of the chronic Arab/Israeli impasse, working with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat as his partners.  Without doubt the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize had—and still has—the instincts of a peacemaker.  By contrast, prior to the negotiations in 1978, Begin and Sadat had contributed more than their share to the blood-letting that still occurs along borders that surround the Sinai Peninsula. In modern usage, they might have justifiably been labeled terrorists. And yet Carter put his already shaky presidency on the line to cloister these foes in the mountains of western Maryland on the outside chance that they could be induced to produce a lasting peace.

It was a risk and an act of political courage, even though new problems developed in the years that followed. Presidents and congressional politicians rarely put themselves on so uncertain a course unless there are guaranteed outcomes.  And that’s a problem.  A politician who won’t risk failed efforts at conciliation is little more than a poseur: a pretender to the role of a leader.

To be sure, the recent brokered deal between Israel and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates is a welcome step. And yet the region still festers, with most of the Muslim world hostile to American leadership.  And the agreements seem more strategic than something closer to a grand gesture of conciliation that would help resolve the issue of a Palestinian homeland.

 

Somehow we are going to have to get beyond celebrating the unilateralism that is now our preferred rhetoric.

The current American challenge of negotiating differences is made worse because of an old national habit of honoring heroes who are supposedly unsullied by the impulse to compromise. We cherish the self-made person, the inner-directed leader, the lone single agent who rejects anything less than what they brought to the bargaining table.  This preference plays out in the narrative tropes that show up in our love of John Wayne’s film characters, or James Bond’s free-style execution of his own form of foreign policy.  We like our heroes to be dominant, assertive, fearless and ready to bolt at the first suggestion that they might make a concession. And so they continue to come in waves of narratives that celebrate intellectual unilateralism: everyone from cinema superheroes, to larger-than-life thinkers like Apple’s Steve Jobs.  Even the small screen occasionally cherishes the mini-rebellions of office workers stuck in the anonymity of drab cubicle farms.

Our preference for the defiant loner has grown so great that words to describe the team player now read like labels of surrender.  “Compromise,” “concession,”  “conciliation,” and “mediation” all carry the odor of appeasement.  And so our interest in performing the rhetoric of defiance is self-defining;  its a cheap way to create a persona suggesting “strong values” and ostensibly settled thinking.  Even history’s great conciliators—among them: Nelson Mandela, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln—seem more distant than the characters we conjure up to illustrate “decisive” and “uncompromising” leadership.  One can only guess at what former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had in mind when he called Russia’s increasingly dictatorial Vladimir Putin a true “leader.”  The statement is a reminder that unearned certainty can be the perfect sign of a fool.

If we are wondering where to begin, I suggest that we reconsider the kinds of people we want to serve in legislative offices. Deliberative bodies require deliberators. And yet our Congress is filled with too many self-styled media stars who show little interest in finding ways to attain mutual consent. They show up for their close-ups in hearings.  But they are often absent from caucus rooms where differences must get hammered out.

Somehow we are going to have to get beyond celebrating the unilateralism that is now our preferred rhetoric. It’s a recommendation that especially holds for our chosen leaders, but also for most of us as we weigh the need for ideological purity against the more functional objective of solving problems.