Listen to this chapter on any podcast app, at YouTube, at Substack, or here:
As we’ve seen, a glance can be enough for us to decide whether we trust someone.
So can a single word.
Every politician, or anyone trying to persuade anyone else of anything, faces two make-or-break moments: the moment before they say a word, and the moment they do.
We turn to that second moment here.
And to “Don’t Mess With Texas.” You probably know the slogan, but you may not know that it represents one of the most successful persuasion projects in history. There are many reasons for that, but among the most important is the power of one word.
Year after year, Texas highway workers collected a bigger mountain of roadside trash. And every few years, the state launched another anti-litter campaign, each landing with a thud. Among the dud messages: “Cleaning Up Litter on Your Highways Costs You” and “LITTERING IS unlAWFUL.”
Texans were unmoved, unless they were moved to produce extra litter. Ever more of it covered ever more of Texas.
Then came the breakthrough, after the state hired a new ad agency, Austin-based GSD&M. Resuming the struggle that had defeated so many others, agency partner Tim McClure was struck by inspiration:
“I was up before dawn one day, walking outside and racking my brains for the right words,” he told Texas Monthly magazine.
As I was walking, I noticed that even the sides of the road in my nice neighborhood were piled with trash. It made me mad. That’s when it hit me: Texans wouldn’t call this litter. The only time I’d ever used the word ‘litter’ was with puppies and kittens. Instead I was reminded of what my mom used to say about my room growing up. Real Texans would call this a mess.
Thus was born a slogan that many people assume is the official motto of the state of Texas.
It might as well be. As an expression of Texas psychology and culture, it’s hard to beat.
And as Tim McClure knew, it’s on the fields of psychology and culture that the battle of persuasion is won.
Compare the impact of ”Don’t Mess With Texas” to “Cleaning Up Litter on Your Highways Costs You” or “LITTERING IS unlAWFUL,” or any message that uses the word “litter.”
If the people you’re trying to reach don’t use that word, if it sounds foreign to them — or even worse in the case of Texans, if it sounds Eastern to them — you’ve lost them. The moment you say it, you brand yourself as an outsider.
And as much as we liberals might wish it weren’t so, humans are naturally suspicious of outsiders.
Liberals want to believe in the Noble Savage myth: that people are naturally trusting and cooperative. Anthropologists say that can be true in a group united by kinship, shared interests, and culture. But the same happy band is likely to fear or hate strangers — and even to build its own solidarity based on xenophobia. It’s an instinct known as the in-group/out-group bias. Psychologist Fabiana Franco explains its evolutionary origins:
Favoring in-group members and suspicion of out-group members was an adaptive strategy. In-group cooperation maximized the chances of survival for individuals and their offspring. Suspicion and avoidance of out-groups minimized the risk of conflict. These strategies continue into modern times. Many of us exhibit loyalty to sports teams, colleges, political parties, ideologies, consumer brands, or cultural groups in patterns that echo ancient behaviors despite the absence of any real physical threat.
Experimenters have repeatedly found they can form random strangers into two mutually hostile groups just by dressing them differently, say in red and green T-shirts. Within minutes, each group will judge the other as intellectually and morally inferior.
Words can produce the same effect. One reason so many Texas anti-litter campaigns failed might be that they used language guaranteed to provoke in-group vs. out-group hostility. Whatever message was intended, the one that was heard was “You can’t trust us.”
Tim McClure and his team knew they had to avoid that mistake. “Don’t Mess With Texas” fluently spoke the language of an in-group: the young, pickup truck-driving males who research showed were tossing the most junk. They didn’t care about anti-litter messages. But they cared a whole lot about Texas and they sure didn’t want anybody messing with it.
The campaign’s first TV ad appeared in 1986. You can still find it online. It stars the legendary Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, seated under his black gaucho hat in a pool of light on a darkened stage. The backdrop is gradually revealed to be a giant Texas flag while Stevie Ray plays a soulful blues version of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You.” A Texan-accented voiceover joins in, calling trash on the highways “an insult to the Lone Star state.” Cut to a closeup of Stevie Ray, who looks up to utter the four now-iconic words.
Texas Monthly described the result:
[I]n the minutes after Vaughan’s performance was first televised, during the 1986 Cotton Bowl, TV stations across the state were flooded with calls from viewers requesting that the new “music video” be shown again.
Other ads would soon follow, featuring other Texas heroes, including Willie Nelson, George Foreman, and the Dallas Cowboys. Within five years, roadside litter was down more than 70 percent. “Don’t Mess With Texas” is still running, and still working, to this day.
As I say, it wasn’t just because of one word. But that word was crucial. More precisely, knowing the psychological and cultural resonance of that word was crucial. From that knowledge flowed all the other insights that shaped the campaign.
Too many liberals have become alienated from this kind of knowledge. Too many can be counted on to say the equivalent of “litter” instead of the equivalent of “mess,” every time.
Much of my work over the years has amounted to teaching clients and students to stop doing that. I’ve found that the more educated they are, the harder it is.
I’ve often introduced the topic by saying we’re going to undo the damage they suffered by going to college. By that I don’t mean to slam higher education. But I do mean to slam our version of it, which has trapped countless graduates in the iron cage of alienation. It does that by training them to speak and think in an alienated language: complex, abstract, intellectualized, divorced from life.
None of our most effective communicators uses that language.
To demonstrate why, I often use a passage from one of the most powerful speeches of recent times, but translated into the language we’re taught to use in school.
Here’s that denatured version.
In America, we believe people should have physical and economic security, confidence in the rule of law, and the ability to participate in a political process that’s free of corruption. However, these values have not yet been fully realized. In this election, we must work together to ensure that they will be.
Those sentences are full of worthy sentiments every liberal believes in. And yet if there were any more of them, even liberals would doze off.
Now here’s what Barack Obama actually said at the 2004 Democratic National Convention:
That is the true genius of America, a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe.
Suddenly, the same ideas have power — enough power to vault a young, freshman Senator to the rank of potential president.
Why was that?
Obama was perfectly capable of using complex, abstract language. But he was too good a politician — and too good a writer — to do that. His language was simple, emotional, and above all, physical.
Pay attention to your own body as we compare phrases from the two versions of the passage. What do you feel when you hear “economic and physical security?” And what do you feel when you hear “we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm?”
In the first case, I’ll bet, what you feel is nothing. No one can feel anything about a concept, no matter how hard they try to convince themselves otherwise.
Now compare “confidence in the rule of law” with “we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door.”
Compare “a political process that’s free of corruption” with “we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe.”
In each case, no one can imagine what the first phrase looks like, or feels like. But everyone can see, and feel, tucking a child safely into bed. Everyone can imagine the chilling sound of that knock at the door, or the anger and shame of being forced to pay that bribe.
Obama spoke like a person who lived in the real, physical world, where you feel what happens — in your body, not in your rational mind.
And yet most educated people have been trained not to feel but to think about what they think they’re feeling.
Of course, sometimes we have to use conceptual language. I do it when I use the word “alienation.” But there’s a reason I often say “the iron cage” instead. It’s hard to have a feeling about the concept of alienation. But it’s a different thing when you imagine yourself trapped in an iron cage.
Obama was far from the first to figure this out. Here’s Aristotle in about 350 BCE:
The soul never thinks without a mental image.
By “soul,“ Aristotle meant an essence that both reasons and feels, something like the unsplit version of the mind described by Antonio D’Amasio and other researchers today. Plato believed that the rational mind must subdue the body and the emotions. But Aristotle argued that thinking is necessarily rooted in our sensory experience of the world.
Again, many modern scientists agree. And virtually all great communicators do. Consciously or not, they follow the advice of Chekov:
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.1
And yet the educated people who would know who Chekov was are likely to be alienated from the very experience he described: the immediate, untheorized experience of being alive.
Their education has trained them to convert experience into rationalized thoughts about experience.
Let’s assume we all speak the standard language of the highly educated.
How do we describe an intense feeling, like grief?
First, we might say it impacts us. An impact can be described by the laws of mechanics. That seems to leave a lot out.
After being impacted by a feeling, we “process” it. Like a machine processes raw materials, or software processes data.
What if the feeling is complicated? We’ll “unpack” it. Like we’re poststructuralist philosophers. They have a theory that all words are like packages that can contain any meaning. Maybe so, but the theory is itself a package around the feeling — and using it places us on the outside of the package.
If processing and unpacking fail, if the feeling is just too much, we might say we’ve been traumatized. That may be true. But meanwhile, the feeling has been medicalized. Trauma is a diagnosis, not a feeling.
Once you start noticing examples like these, you find them everywhere you look. You’re looking at the bars of the iron cage.
The good news is the first step towards escape is noticing they’re there.