Category Archives: Let’s Get Political

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Narrative Politics

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I have a friend named Tyler Borchers. The kid is a freakin’ encyclopedia about politics. I say this only because I’m about to talk politics for a brief post (in my Spencer sort of way) and if you get frustrated at any point with my lack of knowledge, you should go to Tyler’s blog.

Anyway, I’ve been really intrigued by this whole Occupy Wall Street campaign, mostly because of its dependence on narrative. Lacking unified demands or opinions, the Occupy Wall Street-ers do have stories. Lots and lots of stories. So many stories, in fact, that there is a pretty successful Tumblr out there to document them. The people against Occupy Wall Street, though, have retaliated, telling their own stories and starting their own Tumblr.

I don’t think we fully appreciate how much of political debate is narrative. We think that our political party has it all figure out, but we think that because our political party frames the narrative in such a way as to make themselves the winner. When you are in a group, you are always considered “in-group” even though your group is the “out-group” to someone else.

I am in a pretty interesting political situation. At school, my peer group and mentor group are almost exclusively liberal, while at home, my peer group and mentor group are almost exclusively conservative. And I find that my views sort of stretch in either direction depending on where I am physically located and with whom I am talking.

I used to think that this was because I didn’t have a back bone. That I was some kind of jelly-fish citizen with no real opinions of my own, but then I realized it had everything to do with narrative. Conservatives never (or very rarely) frame their story in terms of keeping a group down or keeping the impoverished impoverished.

The above video is admittedly one of the notable exceptions to this rule. Conservatives frame their story in hard work and old-fashioned elbow grease. And who doesn’t like hard work and old-fashioned elbow grease?

And liberals very rarely frame their stories about welfare by saying that “All lazy people should have government benefits.” No. Liberals frame their story by assuming that people aren’t lazy. And who doesn’t want to believe that all people are hard-working?

And this is why politics is so difficult. Politicians have to do much more than solve problems; they also have to paint a whole new vision of the world in which their party is eternally indispensable.

But we can’t blame the politicians too much. We do this day-to-day all the time. Have you ever heard the other side of your friend’s break-up story and realized it wasn’t as bad as he said it was? Certainly, you have. Everyone has.

What story are you selling?

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Mythologizing Greatness

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I asked a friend the other day if she could marry any person in the world regardless of age, class, or other such restrictions who it would be. She answered Barack Obama. That makes some sense to me. She’s pretty liberal and stuff. So it’s cool.

I don’t really know how I would answer the question myself. I feel like I would probably pick a celebrity too, like Emma Watson or Zooey Deschanel or Janelle Monae or someone like that. There are probably a lot of people who would call that shallow, I suppose. But I think it’s something really different than shallow. It has to do with the “Great Man (or Person) Theory.”

The Great Man Theory developed in the nineteenth century as a way of talking about history. It theorizes that important changes are made by a few good people or heroes. In the modern day, the GMT got translated into leadership theory, and now people talk a lot about how influential one person may be for a corporation or an organization.

The GMT, though, has been mostly disproved. History is not changed by one person. It’s changed by a bunch of driven people working together, some more publicly than others.

The big problem with the GMT, though, is it mythologizes people. We think that there is this class of people out there that never deals with any of the things that we deal with – that they are always focused on changing history for the better. This is just false. People are people are people. Abraham Lincoln failed at almost everything he did until he became president, including a marriage.

Sometimes when I’m really down for whatever reason I like to tell myself that maybe I’m just not one of those people who can change things – that I’m not committed enough, not focused enough, that I let the day-to-day weigh on me too much. But I think that’s mostly a lie. The people we look up to, the people who are making a difference are not people who are living without relationship issues, or self-confidence issues, or family issues. They are just people who have decided that there are more important things. And they are people who have figured out how to convince other people that there are more important things as well.

I’ve been learning a lot about Teach for America recently. And whether you agree with their mission or not, there’s one thing you have to admit. Wendy Kopp has figured out how to make people realize that education is far more important than your romantic relationships, your career problems, or sometimes even your ambition. If you talk to a TFA recruiter, you probably won’t be able to get off the topic of education for hours and hours. Because Wendy has made it that important.

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The Perversity of Human Capital and Anglo-Saxons

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A while back I traded in my romantic pen, beard, and large red glasses for G-mail, sweaters, and contacts. I decided I spent too much time lamenting about the world and not enough time fixing it. And for the most part, I was happy with this change until I realized that I had started to use terms like “human capital.” “Human capital” is a term people use in all sorts of official business type things – corporations, marketing, nonprofit work, public policy, and government.  The unfortunate part about terms like “human capital” is that no matter how much you disapprove of such terms, they invariably show up in your vocabulary if you spend enough time in official business type things.

And so I was at a meeting on Thursday, and the words kind of tumbled out of my mouth without even thinking about it. “What we have here is a human capital problem.” And then I cringed. Human capital seems like it should be an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp or cheap college or something like that. Humans are not capital. They are people. Individual people.

In my Medieval English Literature class right now we are learning about the Anglo-Saxons as we read Beowulf. In Anglo-Saxon law, everything had a price. Your nose was cut off in an argument? Six shillings to you from the perpetrator! Even your life was given a price. The Old English word for this price is “weregild,” literally “man price.” My friend very insight-fully asked in discussion whether we still have a concept of weregild. Initially, I thought no. We are popularly taught that human life is invaluable. When someone is murdered now, the murderer doesn’t pay the victim’s family; they are locked up to protect the rest of society. It seemed obvious that we have evolved beyond weregild.

But then, what exactly is “human capital?” Isn’t weregild really what we are talking about when we talk about “human capital?” Sure, we would never say that one man is financially more valuable than another, but we do say that one man is more valuable than another. That is the whole problem of human capital. It assumes that there is a group of people out there that your organization needs that your organization can’t have and that the way to get ahead is to find and woo that group. This is horrible thinking. Everyone brings value to a project. If you have a group of people who are intensely passionate about your organization, you should find a way to use their talents to help you. Figure out how to plug them in and watch as creativity begins to overflow.

My friend from class said that we might as well walk around with dollar values tattooed on our foreheads. At least that way we would know where we stood. I’m afraid she might be right.