You walked into the meeting so upbeat at the opportunity to share your vision. But even as you talked, you could see the lists of objections forming behind the eyes of several listeners — the usual suspects, whose first reaction to most new ideas is to throw up a smokescreen of reasons why we can’t do it. Before you finished your first presentation, you could feel the wind leaving your sails. As you walked out of the meeting, you were as much dejected as you had been excited earlier that morning.

Then, you go through the stages of grief, inwardly and privately, telling yourself that you are never going to cast another pearl of vision before these swines of negativity. You’ll just live in the dull world they apparently inhabit, checking off duties, punching the mental clock, letting the workplace just drift and collecting your paycheck.

And of course, despite your best effort to kill your own soul, it miraculously persists. It catches you unawares. Before long, you have a new, exciting idea about how things can be better for everyone, and you find yourself almost against your will sharing your passion out loud to the swineherd again. (Isn’t it encouraging how those healthiest parts of you can’t actually be killed? What you like most about yourself just erupts in spite of everything. )

The truth is, no-one can suppress their own vision. So forget that. It can be exhilarating, in an ironic way, when the leader is forced to admit and embrace her own health. To admit to herself that what causes her pain among the swine is never going to stop, and she would never want it to, really. No, there are only two choices: succeed in getting these pigs to see what you see, or go find better pigs. (That’s quite enough with the swine metaphor, I agree.)

If you haven’t already done it, stop right here and admit something to yourself: to the degree you actually have vision and try to spread it, you are a special person. You are not normal. (You knew that already, but you were afraid you would be a moral monster if you called yourself special.) But — if you are a special person, doesn’t that mean that the very logic of your own self-image requires that the people around you are not like you? Doesn’t your own vision of yourself argue that feeling the drag of others’ negativity is expected and normal? Embrace it. Oh, you want to have vision and also have everyone around you see it as soon as you speak? Well, that would certainly be better for you. Better for them, too, you say? But if these people around you could see what you see so easily, would you still be special? Would you even be needed? Is it possible you are in the right place, and it is hard? Just asking.

Wherever you go, there is where you are.

Finding a better workplace is an option. You may feel like you will spend years vision casting and never see your dream realized. If you were surrounded by positive people, you think, you could do more than spin your wheels. Why look back and see just futility? Why not change the world?

There is nothing wrong with that choice. It is certainly true that organizations filled with people like you are a magical place, and to be a part of that magic is a once in a lifetime opportunity. These are rare times and rare places. (You do know they were built by people like you, against great negativity? Tell them thanks when you get there. )

But it’s also false to see normal workplaces, filled with the drudgery that weighs on you, as futile. What is the one thing that is here for you that is not there in that magical workplace of your dreams? What is being added to you by this hard work? What are you internalizing in this cycle of disappointment and adaptation that brought us even to this conversation today?

Vision-casting in the midst of negativity, that’s what. And you will not learn that in your ideal workplace, I guarantee you.

So you can go where you’ll be surrounded by more magic, and no-one could blame you for that, or you can stay and get stronger in producing the magic. The good news is that there is no less opportunity to grow in either setting. The growth is just different. Either choice is good; just don’t make a false comparison by seeing your own situation with the negative eyes that so trouble you in others.

There is no typical person.

Negativity is usually self-defense. People defend themselves because they are afraid. Afraid of what? Well, not you, of course, since you are always kind and never attack. (Smile.) They can be afraid of lots of things, but start with the obvious: your ideas, brilliant as they are, sound like more work to them. And they already feel like they don’t get done what ought to be done. They already feel condemned, and would not even be sitting there in that meeting unless they were made to come.

They would be doing something else they actually do consider their job. Some of them feel themselves getting further behind with each moment that you and I are talking to them.

Does that help? Does it help you to remember that often a negative person is a person with a conscience about their own work, and they don’t want to feel worse in the light of their own standard than they already do? Sure, you see clearly that your idea will make their jobs easier, but they honestly do not see that. And you cannot hold against them what they honestly do not see.

Others are negative from early childhood. Or maybe there is something terrible going on in their private life that you’ll never know about, but they just can’t stretch outside of today to be excited about your idea.

OK, you win. They are bad.

I don’t mean that negative people are merely victims. They are morally culpable. They are culpable for killing hatideas which can lift them up and make their neighbors’ work easier and happier. And let’s be honest: some people just want the daily routine they’ve established to not change, because they are self-centered. They are utterly selfish, and don’t give a hoot about the company or the people working alongside them.

Maybe, for some leaders, there is a necessary moment here. Just like everyone needs permission to embrace their own health, everyone needs permission to call sickness what it is. So let’s do. Let’s gather in our own little huddle and label those nattering nabobs of negativity. They are not just afraid, they are bad. I agree.

What’s more, when we come to actually consider actual people, we find quickly that it is hard to untangle the fear from the badness. People are so complex that even they don’t understand why they react the way they do. They are selfish, and will call it something else; they are afraid, and don’t even know it.

But once we’ve nourished ourselves on this exegesis of their badness, what now? As leaders, what now? Overcoming their badness is our job.

Hold them accountable for seeing?

Is all this to say that there is no accountability in the workplace? Are we just to let people go on killing idea after idea, dominating the entire group with their darkness, so that the whole shop is a dead zone? Hopefully not, but the path to positivity is not tighter accountability. It depends on what you actually want when you talk to people. Accountibility structures can get compliance, but compliance is almost never what the vision caster wants. You know yourself so deeply that an unenthusiastic compliance is the last thing you want when you have a vision and you share it. What you want is for them to really see what you see. No accountability structure will accomplish this. Thinking that it can is what produced that old semi-joking break room poster: “The beatings will continue till the morale improves.”

Structured accountability can sustain values that the organization has already adopted, but cannot cause the organization to adopt new values. And if the leaders of an organization do not fully agree on the values, then any discussion of accountability for those values will not work. If the leaders do not see the same vision, their group vision, even communicated well, will look confused and incompetent to those who are not supposed to be vision leaders. The leaders need to shut the door and do the long, hard work of leadership on each other before they go out on the shop floor and give talks about being positive. Even if it takes years.

Culture is changed by force of charismatic, transformational leadership. Passion first, structure second. Vision is what advances the organization today; structure is what preserves last year’s vision.

I am not saying that we should not set high expectations for people. We should. But expecting people to “be positive” simply does not work, in and of itself. They are not failing to perform an objective task. They do not suffer from a cognitive error; it’s more deep seated than that. They have to catch it, like a virus. They can catch it by osmosis, when they are surrounded by positivity, or they can catch it one on one from a great leader. The first is indirect, and follows upon the second, the direct work we need to do as leaders in the midst of the negative aura.

Passion without compassion feels like tyranny.

If you are a positive person, you have a visceral reaction of horror at a negative view of the universe. When it comes out, it even angers you. It angers you at the level where you — dare we say it? — love that other person. You want for them so much that they not be trapped in that dark place. You are jealous for them with a righteous indignation. Be careful at this moment.

This visceral reaction is true and authentic within you, but is… yes, negative for the group, when you display it. It amounts to your own self-indulgence. It can come across emotionally aggressive. For those already feeling a vague fear, it simply feels adversarial. The actual meaning of words gets lost in a general sense in the room that we are now disagreeing and that someone must lose. The win-win is gone. (Keep in mind that “win-win” is an emotional reality, not a logical one.)

Remind yourself to see the world from their point of view, not just yours, not even when yours feels so righteous. (It is righteous, by the way. Just not useful.) What they are perceiving is that they came to a meeting they did not call, heard what they thought was emotion and it sounded like work, and when they said to you “this sounds like work”, you threw a double amount of emotion at them. That’s what this discussion looks like to them.

You either see, or not. There is no in between.

The negative person does not actually see what you see. That means they are not actually objecting to your idea, but to the ghost of your idea they built in your head as you spoke. Do you get that at an emotional level for yourself? They do not reject your idea. They reject a caricature of your idea.

The truth is, when the vision is seen, it is embraced. You have to believe in what you see even more than you do, I think. You have to believe so much that you know that if anyone else sees what you see they will immediately and with all your passion embrace it.

Remember, you are different. That means that whatever it took for you to see your vision will never be enough to make them see it. Their ability to see is not as good as yours. The moment when you feel like you’ve exhausted both the content and the passion in words you feel proud — that’s the moment they are feeling an obscure pressure that feels like work. You’ve just started.

Sequence matters, especially in magic.

There is a downward spiral in group discussions. The visioneer speaks first, then the negatives pop up, then the visioneer tries to debate the negatives, and they dig in. Nothing good can come of this.

Often there is an earlier stage of the discussion that you skipped in your enthusiasm for your idea. The dead give away here is that feeling in the room that we are all talking past each other. When it seems like we are talking about different things, then realize: we are. What sense would it make for a group of friends to fall into a movie discussion, yet each only saw one scene of the movie, and all different scenes, at that? You’d never try that movie discussion, yet we sit through meeting after meeting where it’s obvious the participants are actually talking about different things. If you could see their thoughts, you’d be amazed by the variety of distorted versions of your original vision.

Just stop the discussion. Back up, and go back to the conflicting assumptions, and talk about them. You’ll find more agreement, because people are actually fighting against what is not really there.

Jui-jitsu: move with your opponent, not against.

Sometimes the strongest person in the room is the one pushing everyone down the hill. Don’t respond to a negative with more of your positive, as if everyone just needs another dose. It may seem counter-intuitive, I know, but when you share your vision, and someone objects, move toward the objection, not against it. Affirm it. Agree with it. It is real. It is not the truth about the whole world, as you see it, and the objector’s overall vision is not healthy, but the objection is real because they see it.

In fact, you really needed to hear the objections. (Strange, I know: the objections are ghostly caricatures of your vision but you need to hear them.) You want to draw these ghosts out into the light of day, not stuff them back into their dark closet as if that will make them go away. You need to hear them expanded on, because if you will listen very carefully, you will begin to hear key words and phrases that will give you insight about what the objector really sees. You’ll have a lightbulb go off. You’ll see in a flash of inspiration what it is they are stumbling over, and you’ll be able to speak to it in a way that has hope of succeeding. (Plus, you’ll get to know them better.)

So many good and talented leaders react to negativity in an open group as if it is something to be suppressed, and in doing so they hamstring themselves in the long run. They use their considerable talents in developing cute techniques to get around objections, like misdirection and so on, not understanding that negativity suppressed just becomes a guerrilla war. This kind of “positivity”, taught in management seminars around the world, is a fake positivity. It does not last. It does not seep down into culture.

Another counter-intuitive truth: in the right setting, with the right controls and planning, the most valuable speaker will the the person in the room who is most negative. They will define the contours of your task for you.

You just need to be smart about the time allotted to any individual meeting. You know ahead of time that you are going to get objections. Have time allotted for them. Treat them not as irritating flies to be swatted, but as important points to be addressed before any vision can come true.

I did say that positivity needs to be caught like a virus, yes, and now you are wondering that I’m wanting to encourage negative talk. Doesn’t the negativity also spread like virus? Yes, but it spreads the most when it is most hidden, and will go underground if not aired. The truth is, positivity is a much more virulent organism than is negativity, and the most therapeutic moments are when they encounter each other at full strength out in the open. Again, negativity cannot be suppressed.

Enough with the theorizing

But we can ask anything of people, then? Sure. What you yourself do, actually, is you respond positively by faith, because of who it is that is talking to you. You give the person the benefit of the doubt that if they have an idea there must be something good to it, and you will hear it. And you want your hearers to do the same for you. So, set it up.

Make the group small. And small is not a numerical word, it is a trust word. People who already have built some trust with each other will be much less likely to list objections as they listen.

Especially in a small and trusted group, you can ask everyone to respond positively, before they see anything. Play a game. Let’s call it “Buy your own darn objection.” For every idea that is offered, you can’t offer an objection until you’ve said something positive about the idea. One positive buys you one negative. Keep score on the whiteboard if you can make it fun. Many mid-level leaders simply do not see their own congenital pattern of responding to ideas with objections.

But also, you have to buy their trust. Don’t let projects run away and create work for people till after they have bought into the vision. Make it clear right at the beginning of a brainstorming or vision casting session that the meeting will not end with a to-do list. Keep a space between brainstorming and project work, so that your peers can tell by tone and even body language that this conversation is not a new project coming their way. This zone of safety will let them set their fear aside.

None of this is to argue that vision or cultural change is easy. It is as hard as love, and as rewarding. And really, there is no recipe for transformational leadership. If there were, magic would be common. If something here helps, great — if something here discourages or irritates you, forget it. If you see it that way, it’s not what I meant. I wasn’t clear. I’ll try again later, if you’ll give me another chance.
Filed under: Management ]]> http://taliesan.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/negativity/feed/ 0 taliesan http://taliesan.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/courage-to-refuse-the-adersarial-voice/ http://taliesan.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/courage-to-refuse-the-adersarial-voice/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:22:31 +0000 Tim http://taliesan.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/courage-to-refuse-the-adersarial-voice/ ]]> As most managers will tell you, the hard part is the people. Policy and processes are matters of analysis and intelligence, and can be taught. But getting the people to be what the organization needs — managers who’ve spent time in a trench will tell you this is tougher. Which is why I say that the best leaders are the courageous communicators.

Sure, there are lots of managers who’ve made their way up the ladder in companies where you just need to be smart, articulate, hard-working, loyal, and passionate. All good traits, but you can be all these things and be a horrid manager – and a bad person.

It’s not enough to have a large vocabulary and a sense of syntax, not enough to be poised in front of an audience. Witty doesn’t help. It’s not even enough to see the essence of a matter through confusion and have the skill to say it clearly.

You can have all these tools and use them as weapons. You can be all these things and end up in the history books as just one of those dictators who finally hangs from a lamppost in the town square. Leaders need to be smart, articulate, and perceptive through confusion — but then need to use those tools with the right kind of courage.

We need, first, the courage to say something when saying nothing will get by. Then, when we do say something (and paint a red target on our forehead) we need the courage to resist lapsing, under fire, into our own adversarial voice. These two, together, make a jewel of a leader.

First: the courage to say something. I’m not talking about the kind of fearlessness some leaders show by not caring what anyone thinks or how they feel. Some large personalities will express their opinion without regard to anyone around them. They’ll cut through manners and all protocol and be brutal without regard to setting or object.

It’s easy to admire this when we read it about it from afar, but having to be around such a sociopath is a painful experience, and a closer look always reveals how the companies who tolerate this person spend a lot of money building better people around him to mitigate and clean up the messes.

Such toleration can be the best thing for your company when you have a genuis on your hands (think Apple and Steve Jobs) but don’t make the mistake of looking at the story from the outside and after the fact and conclude that the organization did well because of the crudeness of the savant. No, all such companies build a cocoon around the terrible infant- a layer of pearl around the grain of sand — in order to harvest his sporadic flashes of genuis.

However, think about it: obtuse is not brave. The soldier who runs across the field unaware of the guns is not brave, he’s just ignorant. He may be lucky, but not forever.

In fact, the person who does not feel the pain his words cause actually has NO courage. It is precisely the person with a high level of empathy who needs courage to say hard things, because courage is the ability to act in spite of fear and pain — not in ox-like oblivion. The others say hard things simply because they have missing neurons. And this is nothing less than a pathology, though it is often tolerated because of other talents the perpetrator might have. In the end, courage to seek your own gain against odds is not the courage we admire. In fact, we often detest it.

No, the courage we are talking about goes with caring. Caring enough to say something about what you see when others would let it go is a priceless quality that some people have when they emerge from childhood, but most of us do not. I’m not sure it can be taught. But it certainly can be killed, and most groups seek it out and kill it systematically.

Second: the rarest of courages is the courage to not give in to the natural urge to be a personal adversary. The adversarial voice comes in many forms and to talk about it is highly nuanced. Everyone thinks they know what “adversary” means. But what I mean is this: when the conversation reaches a point where somebody is going to need to be wrong, then we are adversaries. This voice creeps in when you feel your spine harden against the silly objections and negativity. Have the courage to refuse to believe that someone needs to be wrong in order for you to win your point.

By the way, if you are from the conservative right or if you value masculinity you might react to all this talk of avoiding the adversarial voice as if it means avoiding conflict, and you’ll want to label it all as “politically correct”, “touchy-feely”, or fluffy. No. You misunderstand entirely. Nothing could be more strenuous or virile than what I am describing. In fact, the traditional male stereotype contains just the sort of failure of nerve we need to be men enough to surpass. This art I am describing does not avoid conflict; it elicits it. I’m talking about all the hard work that comes before we shoot each other or call each other names. Testosterone is courageous enough, when the conflict has degnerated into war, but often utterly cowardly when the conflict is interpersonal.

These levels of courage do not correlate at all with other talents. The smartest people seldom have them. Words that have been approved in the workplace, like “intelligence”, “talent”, or “skill-set”, don’t connect with what I’m describing. The best I can do is “character”; have you noticed we are embarassed by that word now?

Even when we come for a moment under the spell of the fairy-tale peasant who becomes king, the slave who delivers the city, the cinder girl who marries the prince — after all that, when left to ourselves, we regress to our native snobbery. Like all snobs, we look down at the helpers.

We think of “helping” as the inferior role, or as a downward movement. And we feel any downward movement as a theft of our rightful dignity.

We think that helping someone do something is subordinated to the doing of the thing. But this is not God’s view. He was the King, yet He helped us, and in helping was glorified. His sees helping as a role distinct unto itself; so distinct, in fact, it requires the most exquisite and refined skill set of all. His view is the revolutionary one, while ours is wholly conventional.

This is really something to stop and think about, because it is in such simple language it is easy to miss how it violently upends the universe. So, stop right here: the helper of the gardener is not less than the gardener. The helper does not derive meaning from the helped, or from the work of the helped; the act of helping has its intrinsic and underived glory. Underived.

When Eve was appointed helper of Adam, she became something that Adam was not. Her charism is a unique and noble charism, and there is nothing over top of it in some hierarchy.

Indeed, the distinction of the helping office derives from the Godhead, who has named one of His Persons the Helper.

The unbaptized mind mocks this, and sees here a conspiracy to trick it with fancy words into slavery. It is suspicious of the father himself. I think the lack of a father’s love makes it hard to trust enough to find dignity in helping. The inability to trust is the unhappiness of the world.

The unbaptized mind scoffs, but the true loss of dignity is in the gasping, desperate clawing to move up. Because it is such an insult to our dignity, Jesus constantly condemns the upward ambition. Jesus constantly pictures His kingdom as a mirror image of the world’s.

The feminist objection to traditionalist gender conceptions is rooted in this snobbery. There is an embarrassment about not being the primary. This is an inability to trust, a scar from a primordial insult.

.

In fact, the centurion was wrong at some level, wrong in his assumption that he needed to extract a word from Jesus. There is a hint here, as elsewhere in the Gospels, of Jesus’ puzzlement that we so need His imprimatur.

In all of the life we know in this world, healthy people don’t actually want friends who remain utterly dependent. Only in Protestant theology is that a picture of health.

The evangelists of the happiness ethic like to tell themselves, in the quiet of the night, that their pursuit of happiness is constrained by respect for others. Pursue your inner meaning, sure, but do no harm. So they would say that the function of your conscience in the happiness ethic remains wholly traditional; it should register guilt when you hurt someone.

But this is sophistry. On the page it reads well, but in real life it soon is meaningless, because the definition of harm has been stripped down. In real life the pursuit of personal happiness leads to absence from the lives of people we owe. Absence, when presence is owed, is betrayal. In real life betrayal is violence. In real life, for the self-actualizers, hell is other people.

The art of the modern ethic of happiness is the output of the movie and television industry in America. The protagonist in movies and television is constantly rationalizing — and being rationalized by his god, the writer — as he betrays or neglects loved ones. (Indeed, someone has said that the essence of modern drama is the rationalization of promiscuity.)

We are supposed to like this protagonist as he follows his dreams; after all, he doesn’t kill or maim. But the camera simply passes over absence. The camera easily glosses matters such as infidelity to his spouse and neglect of children. What is owed these loved ones is large, large enough to occupy everyone for their lifetimes of indirect happiness. But in pursuing direct happiness you can feel good that you didn’t assault them or stealing their money while still ravaging their souls by your absence.

The camera won’t see what you SHOULD have been doing. You can consume your attention for decades with rich and difficult work that might even win you a Pulitzer, while your child grows up certain that her father hates her. And you could make it to your deathbed within this ethical universe with a silent conscience.

To be “true to yourself”? Well, there is a little…truth in this phrase, but it is only true in the context of fidelity to others. Here is the pattern: as you pursue fidelity, you learn more about yourself, about why and how you are made. That experience of sudden insight is exhilarating; now you see your self, for a bright moment, as an object of knowledge. And it looks pretty, right then, and it feels joyful because joy itself is just the experience of newness. But the mistake is to extract that new knowledge (and the moment of discovery) from larger life, and make it the direct object instead of the indirect effect.

Those who make it the direct object talk the language of the ethic of happiness, which makes sense for a little while, but the glow is really the burning off of capital fuel from the earlier fidelity. Two steps down the road the self is suddenly disoriented. The self, by itself, suddenly dissipates into nothingness — this sudden loss is surprisingly fast and surprisingly literal. The story of your life suddenly looks like a white page.

The ethic of happiness destroys drama, because the wiser the audience, the more they see that the traditional dramatic obstacles for the protagonist are first internalized, and then lost. The protagonist is no longer interesting. The pursuit of a lover is interesting; the quest for the grail is interesting; the fight with the dragon is interesting; the search for “self-actualization” is banal.

When there is no plot people can go on for a long time scratching at meaning, and even make the loss of plot a liberation. For a time. The art of self-actualization is the art of an instant of sensation, the snapshot. Haiku, imagism, the absurd, the barbaric yawp flung upon the roof the world, the song of myself in which I very well contradict myself — all fun stuff as momentary diversion.

But the soul of man needs a plot like fish need an ocean.

Forget the “studies”. There are lots of real life laboratories, called workplaces. Go to a workplace dominated by females. There are still lots of them — hospitals, for example, where the nursing staffs are still mostly women. Ask the women what they think. Many of them will tell you that trying to manage a group of women is a nightmare compared to managing men. They’ll tell you that the conflict level is high and unremitting.

Again, the women say this about themselves. I first heard it from women whom I’ve supervised over the course of 15 years in management now. (I’m a man.) The small businesses I’ve managed have had workforces of more than 90% women. Over the years many women have spontaneously offered me their sympathy for my task of keeping the female peace. I’ve had many women say to me “I’d much rather manage a bunch of men than a bunch of women.”

There is no doubt that women value collaboration more than men do, and naturally choose to work collaboratively when given the chance. Cooperation is their default mode, while isolation is the default mode of the male. But you have to distinguish between what women value and what they actually do accomplish when in task-oriented groups. In fact, that they treasure collaberation so much actually makes them more sensitive to slight errors of cooperation, since they also perceive much, much more nuance in the interpersonal space than men do. (I hope this last assertion is not controversial. Have you never been married?) And it is precisely this combination which is fatal for the outcome.

The combination is the problem. They both value cooperation and at the same time perceive interpersonal imperfection. This combination exponentiates within female task groups, so they have an exponentially higher list of mental grievances against each other at any given moment than would a group of relatively obtuse, individualistic men. And because these issues are not just cognitive observations but are rooted deep in their value system, they cannot pass them over.

This means that a working group of women will fight more, about more, than a similarly tasked group of men. So, all other things being equal, the female group will be much more likely to break down in conflict than the male.

Of course all things are not equal, so we can’t conclude from this observation anything about the relative efficiency of a female group. Other factors count.

For example, negligence is a male specialty. The general scofflaw in the workplace, who just skips whatever he can get away with, is more likely male. Also, when they do fight, the male group’s fight is more likely to be physical and destructive.

So I’m not saying that females are less good at anything than a male group (indeed, they usually believe they are better, and I’ve not seen evidence to the contrary.) I am saying they do not have less conflict.

You might argue that productivity and efficiency are exactly the issue, since a female group that experiences more conflict yet still is productive is precisely evidence that women do something to overcome all that conflict. But do they, or is it overcome, suppressed, or dampened for them by management support? To extrapolate their productivity-in-spite-of-conflict to a hypothetical governing body, you would have to remove the influence of management — since a female Senate would have no referee.

We should distinguish between task-oriented groups and other types of gatherings. Women love to gather when there is no external task, but rather just explore the richness of friendship. These are different, and I don’t have near the direct experience of the latter as I do the former.

But, you say, the world’s literature is full of woman’s hatred for war. Of course women hate war more than men do, because they feel the bond of love more deeply then men. Mothers and wives feel the loss of sons and husbands more acutely than a man can imagine. But these are distinct matters; women’s suffering from war is not evidence they would be less warlike as governments.

Based on my experience as a manager of women and their own testimony, I’m metaphysically certain that if you elected 100 women to the United States Senate today, tomorrow the conflict level in that body would go up, not down.

But, let’s back up: politics is the struggle between two visions of justice, which share the common assumption that force can accomplish the vision. In one vision, that of the political left, injustice is mostly represented by an incorrect distribution of the money. In the vision from the political right, the first group is just a pack of thieves. Both sides think the other needs to be cudgeled.

So all daily tactics are part of a holy war over the control of the coercive power, to control the money. In the end, it’s just a simple brawl over money, but the activists in each camp do see it in stark moral terms. Either the world is broken and we need the gold to make the world right; or the pillaging barbarians are at the gate, demanding the gold.

The political conflict is, for activists, an absolute moral vision, and so it requires victory at all costs. Politics is jihad. There might seem to be an occasional compromise but those are tactical pauses, in which both sides use the calm to reload.

The two visions cannot be reconciled, because visions are rarely formed by argument or reason, and so rarely change in response to argument or reason. They are pre-cognitive, aesthetic constructs, formed in early childhood, and if you believe in them enough to fight for them you constantly select evidence from your environment to confirm your lifelong vision.

On the left, your side looks to you like a band of saints just building an earthly paradise. Just imagine how beatific it shall be; it is the pearl of great price, this just community , and for it a man or woman will sell all. You are on the barricades in Les Miserable, singing anthems and waving flags. Your hair, despite your beret, is swept back by your own intrepidity. Your eye is like a raptor’s, your talon is clenched around arrows, you are gaunt with ascetic devotion. It’s all stronger than heroin.

Visions are also all-embracing. You sincerely think the other side is either crazy or malicious. There is no terrain outside the vision for the conscience to find a critical foothold. So all political activists are indistinguishable from that long-recognized type, the fanatic. Only the dilettante is squeamish. Since your vision of the final state of society has in it all that you’ve ever imagined of justice, even a transient sacrifice of momentary conscience is justified by the equation in your head. This sly word, that hyperbole, this heightening of my opponents wart, that ignoring of his humanity, — these small mischiefs the price of cosmic justice. Done. Misdemeanors only, since you need the gold to make the world right.

So political candidates and nominees in America are routinely slandered and demonized by tactics that all the activists teach their own children are immoral. Each side sees the other candidates or nominees as willing enemy combatants, intellectual terrorists, but they see their own as smart, qualified servants of the just cause. Therefore, the tactics of the other side look devilish, while the tactics of your own side seem fair, given the larger context of the vision. All armies will commit atrocities if the only other choice is slavery; all political activists demonize people on the other side who are better people than themselves. So both sides become devils, and they are all fighting against devils.

Most soldiers on both sides are congenitally incapable of fairly imagining their opponents’ vision, and those who are so capable actually make bad soldiers and get drummed out early, so the army is selected for hysteria. As your comrades get shot, your picture of the other side as demonic gets confirmed, and embedded deeper and deeper into your emotional life. That’s how war works. You start – start! – with the other side de-humanized, and the process of fighting actually confirms and embellishes the gargoyles you see across the wire. People who enlist for either side tend, over time, to subsume their consciences to the victory of their vision. This is how war works. Everything, including the integrity of language itself (cf Orwell), is eventually submerged by the Cause, and the more clearly you see your vision, the more you see your friends wounded, the more quickly and happily you drown your conscience.

Any more sophisticated depiction of a political fight is propaganda, to be consumed by spectators.

Activists find it useful to label themselves something else, because soldiers long ago discovered that if you look like a non-combatant you can knock off opponents easier. So, today for example, we get such amusing labels as ‘advocacy journalist” and “political blogger” and “‘policy wonk” and so on. If you can pretend to be lounging at the side of the battlefield, just writing down what is happening, you can shoot the enemies of your vision, the killers of your friends, when they are not looking. No matter the label, these are killers all, for a vision of who should possess the money.

The side that is losing at the moment bemoans the state of the country, talks about it going to hell, wails about the Eden now lost, and so on. In five minutes, the battle shifts and the wail erupts from the other camp. The wail is a tactic. The political battle is no different now than it was in 1960, 1860, or than it was in Athens centuries before Christ. People behave a certain way in wars.

But what the activists think about their enemies is never true. Political visions, though rooted deeply in personal psychologies, have little to do with what we would traditionally describe as goodness of character. These two things – political vision and personal goodness – seem to run on nearly independent tracks within one psyche. And this lack of correlation between politics and personal goodness is important. Both sides passionately resist this knowledge, because it is structurally necessary that the other side be devils.

You doubt this? You’re a true believer yourself, I take it.

Imagine you are caught in a natural disaster, like the flood which inundated New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Imagine you found yourself in a band of ad-hoc rescuers, working 18 hours a day for a week, taking survivors off rooftops, all of you risking your lives together to save people you don’t know. Imagine you found yourselves of one mind, exhausted together, trusting each other completely in that crisis atmosphere. It happens, thankfully.

Suppose a year later, someone organizes a reunion, because as the horror wore off you began to remember that week as a strangely golden and precious experience. The foxhole bond needs honoring. You get together in a nice hotel, and this time there is leisure to get to know each other. As the evening wears on, do you think the people you respected the most on those rooftops will be found to agree with your politics? You do realize, don’t you, that political allegiance will be distributed randomly among your heroic group?

So activists of all types are deluded, because they need to be. You can’t shoot people, but you can shoot devils.

Activists are different in private than they are in public. In private, they are jocular about the blood on their hands. In public, clean, but this cleanliness is not for the benefit of the enemy army but for the neutrals. I take all this time to develop the context of political arguments because said context is studiously hidden by both sides in order to recruit civilians. Activists are known by their disengenuous voice.

Disingenuous, in the dictionary, means lacking candor, insincere. But this is imprecise, and so throws away a useful word into a tangle of synonyms. The disingenuous voice is not just insincere; it is fake sincere, it is faux-innocent. It is the voice which extracts an assertion from its bloody context and offers it as clean.

Here is what to listen for: the disingenuous voice talks about some moment in this war as if it is not a war. All such statements of the form “he is for the children” are intentionally ignoring the larger political fight in an effort to utterly fictionalize the moment.

This is for the benefit of the civilians, who have not enlisted yet, and who need to be recruited to feed and clothe your army. If it looks to them like your army is building bridges and roads — not shooting the other side to get the gold – then they’ll more likely feed and clothe you.

So: imagine a nominee for a cabinet position. Suppose the position concerns health care. Let’s stipulate that he is brilliant, a visionary, a good man, a father perhaps, a husband perhaps (I simply don’t know), understands the American health system better than anyone alive. Stipulate that he tells good jokes, sacrifices for his family, loves puppies, and weeps at every Nora Ephron movie. Add your stipulation here.

He may actually think he is just being asked to fix health care, or however he would express it. The combat engineer thinks he is a builder of bridges. The quartermaster thinks he is a feeder of villages. They probably are sincere in their work, enjoy it, are good at it, and so on. All sincere, all good, but all cogs in a killing machine. How war works.

To talk about this or that episode in American politics as if it is any less than a skirmish in the war to own all the wealth in America is to be deceptive. Mr. Nominee, the agency itself, the programs of the day themselves, the use of words like ‘compassion’ and “suffering”, the high-toned arguments about the legitimate powers of the State — these are all instruments in the war. The activist frames the debate. The distinction between the journalist and the activist is that the journalist does not speak in the disingenuous voice.