Imagine this. You and I are house-mates having trouble making rent, and I say, “We should get a bunch of bunnies.” You say, “I think getting bunnies would be spending more money, when our whole problem is that we don’t have enough money.” And I say, “You just think we should get evicted?” And then I go on about how disastrous it would be to get evicted. I accuse you of not caring about whether we get evicted.[1]
You’d recognize my response as unreasonable. Because it is.
Yet, that is exactly the pattern of our public discourse about politics. Too often, we assume that there is only one “plan” (solution, policy, approach), so if someone rejects our preferred plan, it’s because they don’t acknowledge the need. Therefore, our political discourse is all about need, and how horrible (irrational, corrupt, stupid) everyone is who disagrees with our plan. I’ll come back to that, but let’s start with what a good disagreement looks like.
And here’s where some concepts shared by folks in conflict resolution, policy argumentation, and a bunch of other fields come in. It’s useful to think about a problem in terms of seven questions:
1) What is the problem?
2) How bad is this problem? (What are the consequences of not solving it? Will it go away on its own?)
3) What caused this problem? How did this problem arise?
4) What are our options for solving this problem? (What are the various plans we might adopt?)
5) Which plans solve the problem we’ve identified?
6) What is the likelihood of success, ads/disads, costs/benefits for the most plausible plans? How do they compare to one another?
7) What are the likely consequences of the various plans? Is there a possibility of unintended consequences worse than the problem we’re trying to solve?
1) For you and me, the problem is that we can’t make rent, and 2) that’s a bad problem, since if we can’t solve it, we’ll get evicted.
3) So, what caused it? Our problem might be that the rent has gone up astronomically, or that I lost my job and haven’t tried to get another one, or that I’ve been spending money recklessly.
Here’s why the narrative as to how we got here matters: each of those causes implies a different kind of solution.
4) If the only reason is that the rent has gone up astronomically, then one approach might be to see if that was legal—did the landlord violate the lease? Laws regarding rent? If the only reason is that I lost my job and haven’t tried to find another, then it would make sense for me to try to find another job, or it might make sense for you to evict me, and get a new house-mate. If I’ve been spending recklessly, then I should stop doing that, and you might have some trouble figuring out how to get that to happen.
It’s possible that there are several contributing factors, in which case the approaches most likely to be successful might be combinations—I try to get a job and get my spending under control; you give me a deadline by which I’ve gotten a job or you’ll evict me; I try to get a job and we get a third room-mate.
One option is for us to get bunnies; it isn’t necessarily a good option, but it’s an option. And so the question is: why do I think that would solve the problem? How is that related to how we got here? If I am unable to pay rent because I keep getting involved in MLM, and I’ve become enamored of a bunny MLM, it would be reasonable for you to point out that I’m repeating exactly the behavior that caused the problem.
I might argue that I’ve always wanted bunnies, or that getting evicted is making me sad and bunnies will cheer me up—getting bunnies might solve some problem (my desire, my sadness), but not this problem: our facing eviction. In fact, since there would be added expenses, it might make the problem worse.
It’s also possible that there is no solution—that I can’t get a job that would enable us to afford the astronomical rent. In that case, it might make sense to try to find a way to break the lease that doesn’t involve eviction (so we don’t have an eviction on our financial record).
6) Winning the lottery would solve the problem, but that doesn’t mean that spending all our money on lottery tickets is a good plan; the likelihood of success is small. Advocating that we spend all our money on lottery tickets presumes that it’s a successful plan—people sometimes advocate a plan on the grounds that it would work, when in fact it might not. Seeing if the landlord has violated the lease (or the law) might work, but adopting that plan would mean getting expert advice (which might cost). Getting a job might also require expenditures, or be difficult in various ways. Every possible plan has advantages and disadvantages, and some plans are incompatible. We can’t spend all our money on lottery tickets and spend money to get expert advice on the lease. If I’m spending all my time job hunting, I wouldn’t have time to talk with experts about the lease.
7) Talking about unintended consequences is that hardest, I think. It’s basically worst case scenario thinking (how might this go wrong), and many people are superstitious about worst case scenario thinking. But thinking about it ahead of adopting a plan can mean that we put things in place to prevent the worst case from happening (e.g., have a backup plan), or that will let us know things are going south. Hiring an attorney to fight the rent increase might cost a lot of money and simply enrage the landlord, guaranteeing our eviction. Getting bunnies might be a violation of the lease, another way of guaranteeing our eviction.
My basic point is that acknowledging that there is a need is not necessarily associated with one solution. Similarly, disagreeing about what we should do (the plan) doesn’t mean disagreeing that there is a need. You might believe that we should have a lemonade stand, or cut back on what we’re spending in various areas, or get a loan—we have a lot of policy options, and we need to talk about them.
What happens in too much political discourse, though, is the bunny move. We have a problem, and disagree about the plan, and then instead of going through the various questions, we stay on the first. We either accuse the opponent of not really caring about the problem. Or, if we don’t like what we think are the only possible plans, or have no idea what to do, we deny that there is a problem. Neither tactic gets us reasonable disagreement or effective policies.
[1] For added unreasonable points, I might accuse you of being a bunny hater, communist, fascist, or some other group I hate.