 In yesterday's article
I prescribed a two-part process for prompting people to change (their
beliefs, and/or their behaviours): - find a way to make it easy for them to
change, and
- find a way to make it real and personal for them
so they care about it enough to change.
Two readers protested: "You can't make people care".
They're mostly right -- you have to wait until they're ready for what
you have to show them, or tell them. But what you can do is inform
them, so that, if they would care if they knew, they will.
The best way to inform people depends on what I have called their
'information behaviour'. Some people respond to stories, while others
need to see for themselves. Showing is usually better than telling:
If you'd take the train with me, uptown, thru the misery
Of ghetto streets in morning light, it's always night.
Take a window seat, put down your Times, you can read between the lines,
Just meet the faces that you meet beyond the window's pane.
And it might begin to teach you how to give a damn about your fellow man.
Or put your girl to sleep sometime with rats instead of nursery rhymes,
With hunger and your other children by her side,
And wonder if you'll share your bed with something else which must be fed,
For fear may lie beside you, or it may sleep down the hall.
Come and see how well despair is seasoned by the stifling air,
See your ghetto in the good old sizzling summertime.
Suppose the streets were all on fire, the flames like tempers leaping higher
Suppose you'd lived there all your life, do you think that you would find
That it might begin to reach you why I give a damn about my fellow man; And it might begin to teach you how to give a damn about your fellow man But, if what you're showing is too stark, or perceived to be
manipulative (think of the ads for charities that show starving
children), it can backfire. Showing someone what they need to see in
person is best, but films, photos, music, personal accounts and other
stories, and even novels (
e.g. Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and CM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello) can be effective ways to inform people in ways that will engage them emotionally and get them to care, and then to change --
if the change is not too hard.
Yesterday I gave the example of getting people to care about the cruelty of factory farming by showing films of what goes on
inside them, while at the same time inventing wholesome and delicious meat-substitutes
that make it easy to become vegetarian (or creating distribution markets for local, organic, free-range farms); the two steps together could
bring about the necessary change of eliminating the demand for factory
farmed foods.
A woman's shelter in Toronto is running ads that try to walk the
line between grabbing attention and turning people off, featuring
pictures and data on the abuse of women, children and seniors. One of them
is shown above. The people I've talked to are split about whether they
'work' or not. These are PETA-style tactics -- The real question is whether the hotline telephone
number rings more because of them -- whether it makes the 'hard'
behaviour of reporting abuse 'easy' enough.
So what's your favourite cause, and how might you be able
to make it real, personal, something that people care about, and easy
for people to change? If you can't think of one, here are some to put your mind to: - The need for an effective, patent-centred, equitable, universal healthcare system
- The need for a self-directed education system, with facilitators and coaches instead of bums-on-chairs lecturers
- The need for intentional, sustainable, responsible, self-sufficient, car-free communities
- The need to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Palestine and elsewhere, once and for all
- The need to give struggling nations back their resources and economic solvency and work with them to create viable nations
- The need to get people to live radically simpler lives, buying local and responsibly only what they need
- The need to redistribute wealth within and between nations so that the poor have a chance to lead decent lives
- The need to quickly reduce greenhouse gases by 90%
- The need to protect wilderness and biodiversity, in large enough, connected areas to prevent ecosystem collapse
- The need to end xenophobia, and allow all people the right to live where they want to live
- The need to smash corporatism, end corporate crime, gerrymandering, political graft and corruption
Answering
the question "How can we make these issues real for people who don't
care or can't relate to them?" is about making it personal. It takes a
lot of imagination to do this: Why should someone who's lived all their
lives in a city care about protecting rainforests, other than
conceptually and abstractly? Answering the question "How can we
make it easy for people to become part of the solution?" is about
innovative thinking. It takes even more imagination to do this. If
carbon credits and donations to charity are the best we can do to make
it easy, we are setting ourselves up for failure. And if we can't answer these two questions, or believe there is no answer, we are guaranteeing failure. Thanks to The Toronto Observer for the copy of the poster |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
