Using Communication To Wound Or Heal
Subscribe Today!
Communication is being used either to wound or heal, especially in the political context of the United States. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom tackle how politicians can create the most amount of damage through what they say or how they communicate just because they can, versus how they can help ease and speed up the healing of a wounded nation, race, group, or individual through communication that has many voices or a multi-faceted perspective. They also touch on the authoritarian mindset and how this mindset is wounding America for the benefit, ego, and status of one person.
---
Watch the episode here
I am happy to be here with you to talk about using communication to wound or heal. This is an important discussion for us to have, especially in the context of what’s going on in the United States politically or in our government leaders if you don’t want to say directly politically. There’s a lot of communication being used to wound than to heal.
I feel disheartened about how communication is being used in a separate way pulling Americans apart from our collaborative agreement called the Constitution. The Constitution is built in a collaborative agreement between three branches. If we have a collaborative agreement and we want to stay in that, what happens is we can call out somebody that is exaggerating and spinning or somebody that’s meeting the need for truth in order to create separation or interest. You and I as consumers, we have bought products that we have regretted.
We’ve bought things that we spent money, time and energy on, in which money’s the energy piece of this. We spent a lot of time making the money that we make. We gave that money to somebody else on a promise that this product or service was going to help us. It’s going to be better than the other product or service that’s available to us. Why is it better? I don’t know. It seems like it’s going to get the job done. Why? Because the person is an established and respected person. The person comes from a reputable company. That’s good, maybe I do my due diligence. The person’s a billionaire. They must know something about how to run big organizations. They can run big organizations better than the current people we have running the biggest organization called the federal government. The sun is a little more problematic because we’ve bought something that we can’t return. Many Americans bought and were sold by President Donald Trump.
He’s non-refundable. I never thought of it that way.
It’s not a refundable moment. What happens is that we opened the box. The box had some stuff in it. No matter how good he says the stuff that’s in the box which are those different promises. Even the way that he’s forcing the stuff that’s in the box that most people don’t want. They don’t even know that it is ineffective to keep liking that thing called “The wall” or so on and so forth. All of us agree about immigration reform because there needs to be a path to citizenship, but not to people that bought the box that said, “Isolationism.” They bought, “Enough of the people of other races coming into my city, my country and my workplace. I don’t know what this person looks like. I don’t know what their values are. It is messing with my safekeeping primitive brain.” It’s about safety and protection of the unknown. I bought that in the box. All of a sudden, we’re in a place where the communication that was used to sell that message is now the communication that’s being used to wound or divide America along that same line.
It seems that that’s all we get in our daily information coming out of the White House or coming from the President on Twitter, are these communication messages. I don’t know that there’s been many to heal. The vast majority have been to wound.
There’s a lot of wounding going on. If you think about a time of remembrance on Facebook or somewhere, I got the post where it had, “Here’s what Barack Obama posted on 9/11 and here’s what President Trump posted on 9/11.” You got to have some time to heal some stuff. You can’t keep sharpening the knife and cutting on something that you don’t like on the next moment and on the next day because you have the biggest platform. You’re going to create them the most amount of damage that you can because you can. That’s problematic. The need for respect is a hierarchical need. In other words, it’s something that in some cultures is given away to others, to the elderly. Respect your elders. Do you see how that’s given?
Not if they’re not drugging women and sexually assaulting them. I don’t know if I want to respect that elder much. I’m picking the low-hanging fruit to go, “I could have respect for someone because the person generally played in the space that they stood for some values but didn’t beat the other side up all the way about it.” Somebody can be offended by a certain type of advertising on a billboard that is posted on the drive to a school. All of a sudden, your kids are looking at this advertising with a woman doing whatever she’s doing sexually or whatever. It catches your eye and it is a sales and marketing freedom of speech thing and it does fit in the guideline of what sexuality is and what identity might look like with that product or service that’s being provided.
Meanwhile, on the way to school, can we please have a little bit of protection for kids growing up and this stuff has got to come at different times? I don’t want to have a developmental conversation with my six-year-old about why does that woman look that way.
The kids are not ready for that discussion yet. I want to respect the First Amendment and the freedom of speech. I want to do the Second Amendment of the right to bear arms. I want to honor these different things, but they also have to be in a counterbalance to other people’s needs like the need for safety and the need for protection to someone to live a life. Not thinking by going to a night club with their friends that might be the last time they ever party or by going to school, that’s the last time I’ve ever got to see my kid. I don’t want that to be in my country.
If I have a communication that heals, it’s got to be communication that has many voices or a multi-faceted perspective, not an adversarial perspective. Most certainly, not a spin perspective. If somebody says something or writes an article that is dark that you’re going like, “I don’t know anything about this dark thing that I’ve written here or that you’ve written. Tell me more about that.” Do their best to minimize the dark thing that the person wrote. That’s not balanced. That is going to be conversation that wounds because it’s not in perspective. It’s not the way an adult thinks. It’s the way a codependent parent raises their codependent child.
That’s a scary thought right there.
“I’m not going to talk about the thing. You’re just a good boy. I know that you trapped that squirrel and you killed it the way you did, but you’re such a good boy. You might be a biologist when you grow up.” The kid’s got some problems. The kid has got to be taught how to value life a little bit differently. The dog might be happy that the squirrel’s dead. A lot of things have happened to see how this narrowing of communication and expertise has taken place. It’s like, “I’m not going to take the advice of the weathermen that studied this.” That’s the narrowing. That’s hierarchical. “Respect me and respect that I gave the right message.” There are some life and death pieces to that because people are not fully keeping their eyeballs on all this stuff. If you’re just trying to keep eyeballs in your direction like the way the administration does is, “Keep eyeballs on us.” What that means is that it creates a narrow view that the leader can do no wrong. It’s guised around respect that has been handed over to him.
It’s about respect that he demands, not that he earns. He does demand respect and he is unwilling to admit that he ever erred in any way, that he ever made a mistake. The example you were alluding to was the hurricane path track in Florida for Hurricane Dorian. He said a couple of times in the media that people in Alabama were in danger from this hurricane. Why he had wanted to emphasize Alabama? I don’t know. Once he said it and it was pointed out to him that that was incorrect, he could not possibly admit that he made a mistake there, “He was remembering an early path of the hurricane that might have even brought it into the Gulf of Mexico or whatever. Since then, it changed so let’s move on.” Instead, this becomes the news story of the week, not about the people being pummeled by Hurricane Dorian so much, but the President. Is he telling the truth or is he not? It was maddening.
There are people sitting in South Carolina and North Carolina who did not get the news coverage that it needed in order to get the funding and repairs it needed and their lives back in order because of this Dorian thing. It has been set back six to eight months at least. It could clearly wipe a year out. The same thing happened with Sandy. My sister lost a house in Sandy. I know about her wading through her living room, trying to move everything to the top floor and losing their music studio in the backyard. I have seen having to go out there in waist-deep water to get things out as the tide was coming in over Atlantic City. That’s real-time stuff. If he’s spending time on distracting from that, the people in South Carolina and North Carolina are being set back six months, eight months or near a year’s time because there’s no focus. We’re onto the next crisis that he’s creating instead of focusing on who are the people that you need to help right now, rather than saying, “Let’s distract so that people don’t talk much about the FEMA money running out.” We’d go like, “The insurance doesn’t cover it, sorry.”
Don’t get me started about how insurance is. “Is this covered by the hurricane or is this flood damage?” “You have hurricane damage. You don’t have flood damage.” It’s like, “What policy did I sign up for? Are there any protections for that?” Communication used to wound is going to be one that is not written in integrity but also a strong skew to promoting a point of view that has a non-accountability, you’re on your own, tough luck. If you lost a child at an elementary school, our Second Amendment is much more valuable than your child. Is the Second Amendment more valuable than life? I don’t think that’s quite right. For me, it’s that way.
There has to be a balance to it. That’s what strikes me is that communication coming out of the White House, in particular, is out of balance. The pendulum has swung so far to the need for respect for the leader above all else that it is it so out of balance and all the communication is meant to wound. It’s meant to be from a position of power and an authoritarian level of communication.
It’s weird because it’s the same thing America was built on. It was leaving the authoritarianism in the class system in England. It was like, “These people are taking all the wealth and this generational wealth. Have you seen these monarchs? Have you seen these nobles? Why do their children get to inherit and encompass and everybody else gets to eat crow and dirt on this? That’s problematic.” That’s the reason why the presidency is set up for the number of terms it is. You’re going to get some benefits off of your dad being a president. If you follow the same line as your father, you’ll even get a talk show, a TV show, or whatever. The good news is that there’s a way back from authoritarianism and the mindsets that go with that causes plane crashes. It causes people to advocate respect to the pilot rather than a discussion between the pilot and the copilot. I like Malcolm Gladwell’s story on this about how in authoritarian countries there’s more plane wrecks than there are in collaborative countries. You have some insights about that too.
Our readers may be a little puzzled like, “What are you talking about? There’s more plane crashes in countries where there’s more culture of authoritarianism?” It’s true. I know this because I’ve spent a lot of time in China in my career for like 1.5 to 2 years. That culture has ingrained in it at a deep level of respect for authority figures to the point of not questioning them. The authority figure could say at 12:00 noon in the middle of the day, “That’s the moon up in the sky shining bright.” You know it’s the sun and you say, “You meant the sun, right?”
No, you don’t question that authority figure. You accept what they say. That is a dangerous thing for a pilot and a copilot situation of an airplane. It’s a good metaphor for our government too in some ways because it’s meant to be a check and balance. Whenever I’ve flown over to China, there’s 350 to 400 people on an airplane. I want to make sure that if the pilot makes a mistake, the copilot speaks up and says, “That’s incorrect. We’ll end up crashing the plane if you do that,” or maybe a lot less serious than that.
“This gauge doesn’t seem like it’s working correctly, Captain. There’s a light that’s coming on. How much of a danger is that? Do we need to go into emergency protocol on this? Our navigation numbers don’t quite look right. The stars aren’t quite sitting the right way.” Whatever the feeling that the copilot or the navigator is giving feedback in that collaborative cockpit. That they’re all working together to get this group of people to have a safe landing, has got to have multiple voices. If I am going to build an authoritarian government, the first thing I want to do is not surround myself with the best people. I want to surround myself with people that say yes to me. I also do not want to fill vacancies. I do not want to fill these different positions of these essential government-mandated positions. These are positions that were voted on and the funding is in place to pay those people. If I take a look at the National Security Advisor position which were in our fourth round.
Now that John Bolton has resigned or been asked to resign depending on what you believe.
Depending on the truth around that, the wound and the heal. Look at how they’re both wounding each other on respect. Notice how they’re also trying their best to purchase truth. There’s a reason why we’re doing this show the way we’re doing it. It is because they’re purchasing truth by raising doubt and skepticism and then co-opting truth to whatever side that they’re going to do, “The reason why I fired him is he was a hawk. I’m more of a hawk than he is.”
That is a dopamine hit right away, “That is uncertainty and then anticipation that I have respect and I know what I’m doing.” As he quoted himself, “I am my own National Security Advisor.” It’s like, “Where do you get your information? Who do you get it from?” “I just watched the news. I listened to others. I just formulate it.” I can appreciate that in a creative entrepreneurial space for a time being, but it doesn’t create a stable organization. It doesn’t create a stable company. It’s great in the startup phase. I’ll take the person that has come at pulling ideas off the wall to see if you can get something to stick. I’ll take that all day in an entrepreneurial space.
A startup company is a disorganized mess and having one person who has vision and experience and knows how to get things done dictating everything is what a company like that needs. If a company gets to a certain size, you better have policies, procedures, systems, other things in place and a team of people who are working collaboratively or it isn’t going to work.
We need the copilots in place. We need the different meetings that take place where people are bringing the civil servant that has built a career around the certain expertise that they have studied on, researched and have the people networks in place to get something done to make the big guy look good. Why make the big guy look good? Because he’s the one that put them in that position and they get a moment of acknowledgement, respect and celebration that they accomplished something.
If you’re trying to get a ceasefire to take place, you’re bringing the Taliban to Camp David and you don’t tell anybody about it and you try to make it a big surprise as if it’s a game show, there are big problems with that. Because number one, why would they ever trust Americans? Flying over on a plane to get here to be in this space where there’s a whole adversarial energy going on around that as well as the respect of what Camp David has stood for and represented? If all of us pull it together and say, “Here’s the peace treaty with the Taliban.” They go back and one of their factions decide to take it out on somebody else, take their views in the hierarchical way that they have the world because they are hierarchical religious fundamentalism.
People can be religious and fundamentalism all by themselves. It’s when they impose that belief structure on somebody else.
Everybody has their right to fight for the things they want. If you want to fight for being a Nazi, fight for being a Nazi. I don’t think that narrow-mindedness did well. It has a good following but if you have the thought that you can do it, take it out for a spin. Even though I don’t particularly align myself with that, take out your First Amendment right to speak up in a way you would like. They might not respect you for your viewpoints or your values because it’s not in alignment with the way I see the world. More inclusive, more connected, greater perspective and limited identity on the difference between this thing and human beings of different races and colors.
I have a more holistic view of that and then I look at the numbers and say, “As a white person, I’m outnumbered by other people of other races and I’m okay with that.” These different countries with President Trump and his admiration for the authoritarian mindset.
Whether it’s Putin, the Chinese leader, or the North Korean leader, whether it’s any of those people, it feels like they get the need for respect handed to them through strength and oppression. He’s doing strength. If he gets re-elected, oppression is coming next.
I bet because then, he won’t have to worry about being thrown out. He’ll run out the clock on it over the next four years doing whatever he wants.
That’s what winds up happening on the second term of the authoritarian things like in Venezuela. You have this dynamic leader that started down a socialistic path. He had some promise at the beginning but narrow-mindedness in socialism because socialism could be narrow-minded. It’s like, “Fire the people that are in charge to put less-skilled people in charge of your oil reserves.” What are you, nuts? That was not a good socialistic choice. The blend between socialism and capitalism is where the fit is. It’s two different mindsets. We want one to run and be able to play with risk and creativity in an innovation and a safe way. We want the other one to keep the stability, the foundation, the walls up and everything up.
Capitalism is more of addressing than it is an infrastructure. It’s more the decoration that goes on the house than it is the way the house works best. What’s the biggest problem America is having right now? Infrastructure which is the walls and the foundation of the house. Why are we not building them? Because capitalism wants a bigger piece of the pie. They want to think, “No, this window dressing. I want to charge you $1,000 to hang this on that wall that won’t stand long.” It’s like, “I want this government bailout.” The banks did it. They did exactly that. They took the money and they remodel all their facilities.
Why did they do that? Because they weren’t sure about the stability of the government in the marketplace and they were paying attention to their shareholders. They were forgetting about the big picture. They were looking at their stuff. They didn’t lend the money that we gave them to lend to bail people out. They didn’t do what we asked them to do with the $700 billion we started with.
We want this authoritarian mindset. For all the politicians out there, we want to advocate for the problems with an authoritarian mindset. Not so much labeling him that but being specific about what he’s doing which is authoritarian.
To add to that, it’s clear that this whole situation that’s happened with John Bolton’s exit as the National Security Advisor, brings some things into focus here. I have read a bit about this. It points out that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is much built around whatever can be done to make him look good or to draw attention to him and to get more eyeballs on him. Why is he cozying up with Kim Jong-un and going to meet him at the DMZ at the border of North and South Korea? Why is he had a couple summits with him that were all about show more than actual substantive negotiations? It’s because of the photo-op and the window dressing making it look like, “I’m important. I’m accomplishing something.” He continues cozying up with authoritarian figures like Vladimir Putin. He admires that strength and he admires that they get complete control to do what they want. His foreign policy isn’t about trying to achieve any big global agenda, higher purpose or principle other than meeting his need for respect and self-worth.
Respect, self-worth, identity, recognition and brand promotion. It’s all about that. Donald Trump is going to build some hotels in North Korea because they have great beaches. You’re shaking your head a little bit. It’s like, “What?” The weird part about that is because what he has done in this position with Kim Jung-on, he will get that land for free. He will build that building. There will be a resort in North Korea with a building on it and with his name on it. It depends on how he survives this in the next couple of years, the election year and then the legal fallout year that he’ll have or two. We’ll see where he and his brand go from there.
He moves from one sizzle moment to the next sizzle moment with a great deal of ease. It doesn’t matter if the sizzle moment is bad or good. He uses it the same way whether it’s the misspoke or the intentional speaking about Alabama so that he can carry Alabama. Any time the President mentions the state, “He mentioned us. He cares about us. He cares about our state. That’s why he mentioned Alabama.” If it was far enough along that he could have included Louisiana and Texas, he would have done that too.
He did that. He says, “This is an erratic stable storm.” Which one is it? Is it erratic or is it stable? It was one of the horrific hurricanes ever because it stayed in one spot and kept wreaking havoc in one spot. He said, “The initial broadcast that I had when it was over here is when I remember the word Alabama and I brought it over here.” He’s not interested in the correction of truth because the thing that he knows as a marketing and salesperson or he’s been practiced to know this. Don’t admit you’re a mistake, always claim respect even though that it’s not true, and people will keep advocating respect in your direction because you’re acting as if you know.
It’s like the father who abuses his child that still gets respect from the child even though the father’s beating the crap out of the kid because the kid doesn’t know any different. “At least my dad disciplined me. At least my dad did this. I must have been a bad kid.”
You’re a kid being normal. He’s the one with the problem. This is a big part of the problem that we’re facing as a nation. As we go to heal this and go into the transition, Tom, the main thing that we need to focus on is back off labels and diagnoses unless it’s specific.
If you’re reading this, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, those are the current frontrunners. Tom Steyer got 4%. It seems like he’s trying to carve his way up. If you’re reading and if you have the ability to find this message, use what he has done first and put the label after it. It would sound like this, “By not hiring people to these key executive positions, the way a functioning company would hire key executives, he’s acting more in the authoritarian mindset. I’m not sure we would like to do that as Americans because that means our diversity and cooperation will be lost. It’s not in the spirit of our Constitution to have one person making the decision. We’re built around collaboration. We’re not built around the way he’s doing things. If you’re going to vote for that next time, realize that what you’re giving up is a part of the freedom that has been fought for up to this time.”
You can even tie that into the, “I am my own National Security Advisor.”
That’s correct.
What he’s saying is, “I don’t need all these other experts advising me. I know what’s best.”
“I know what’s best. I have this thing.” What’s weird is that other nations that have authoritarian leaders have got other authoritarian mindsets around them in collaboration. Kim Jong-un has other authoritarian people around him that know that if I don’t act as an authoritarian to people below me, I will lose my job/lose my life. It’s the same thing with oligarchs in Russia. If I’m not playing ball in the way the agreement is working between the small part of Russia that I get to rule. The petrochemical or whatever the various different industries are that the different oligarchs run. If I don’t run my ship and if I don’t do my cut, if I don’t pay attention to the authority above me and if I don’t get the people below me to follow that same line, I’m in trouble.”
The authoritarian mindset is the avocation or the handing over of respect to somebody. I can even play different authoritarian positions against each other. In Russia, Putin is doing a wonderful job of getting all the religious fundamentalists people, that’s an authoritarian group, to get their voters to continue to vote for the other authoritarian person. I thought Russians used to persecute people with religion, didn’t they? That’s not too long ago, but that’s not happening now. They got those people in lockstep. It’s dangerous for this experiment of America over the last 250 and so years that we’re drifting towards this authoritarian piece.
It’s funny in high school, this one Sociology teacher had a map from a researcher that said that America was going to become more authoritarian and Russia was going to have more capitalistic elements. I’m shocked. I graduated in the late ’70s and that chart is almost dead on. It was right on the money and it was a scary thing. Getting back to an undivided nation and getting back to language that heals, that’s the next step that you and I can talk about next because the wounding part is clear. When this wounding takes place, there is a bleeding of independence and choice.
You laid out what it might sound like if any of the Democratic challengers want to talk about this in a way that would be quite powerful and productive while not on its face just doing what Trump does in labeling the president as something. Instead, makes people think a little more and realize, “That’s what’s happening.”
I’d rather vote for somebody that is a liar, rather than vote for the person that is calling him a liar because if you’re calling him a liar, you’re calling me a liar. That’s where his percentage is hanging now, “If you call this person a liar, you’re calling me and my vote a lie. I don’t want my self-worth and I don’t want my identity to be there. I’d rather double down the way he does and piss everybody off by doubling down.”
Doesn’t that bring into sharp focus how incredibly damaging it was for Hillary Clinton to call a block of voters to deplorables?
She didn’t know that she was going to be on camera. She didn’t know she was being filmed and she didn’t know it was going to go viral. They were not deplorable. They are voters that were looking for a change to happen in a large organization, the federal government, that none of them can understand. None of those voters understand. You and I understand the federal government and all the different nuances. It’s like, “What does the apartment of the interior run?” “Everything.” It’s like, “Do they run this thing?” “Yeah, they run this thing.” It’s fascinating and important to get things in alignment and that we be in alignment. A language that heals will get us there, not language that divides. This has been a good one. Next time, we’ll get into the healing part of this.
I look forward to that. Thank you, Bill.
Thanks, everybody.
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
