How to Lose in One Word: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 12

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.

Full transcript and links at Substack and DastardlyCleverness.com.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in theService of Good, I’m Spencer Critchley.

This time (00:04):
the first draft of Chapter 12 of The Liberal Backbone:
“How to Lose in One Word.”
As always, you can find the previouschapters in previous episodes,
or at dastardlycleverness.com,on the Dastardly Cleverness YouTube

channel, or at Substack (00:20):
just search there for Spencer Critchley. And
if you have any comments or suggestions,I’d love to hear them. Here we go.
As we’ve seen, a glance can be enough
for us to decidewhether we trust someone.
So can a single word.
Every politician,or anyone trying to persuade

(00:42):
anyone else of anything, facestwo 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 persuasionprojects in history.

(01:05):
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 mountainof roadside trash.
And every few years,the state launched another anti-litter
campaign, each landing with a thud.

Among the dud messages (01:25):
“Cleaning Up Litter on Your Highways Costs You”
and “LITTERING IS unlAWFUL.” (In
that second one, the “awful” in “unlawful”was in all caps). Texans were unmoved,
unless they were moved to produceextra litter.
Ever more of itcovered ever more of Texas. Then came

(01:47):
the breakthrough, after the statehired a new ad agency, Austin-based GSD&M.
Resuming the strugglethat had defeated so many others,
agency partnerTim 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

(02:09):
I was walking,I noticed that even the sides of the road
in my niceneighborhood were piled with trash.
It made me mad.

That’s when it hit me (02:18):
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 usedto say about my room growing up.
Real Texans would call this a mess."
Thus was born a sloganthat many people assume

(02:40):
is the official motto of the stateof Texas. It might as well be.
As an expression of Texas psychologyand culture, it’s hard to beat.
And as Tim McClureknew, it’s on the fields
of psychology and culturethat the battle of persuasion is won.
Compare the impact of ”Don’t MessWith Texas”

(03:00):
to “Cleaning Up Litter on Your HighwaysCosts You”
or “LITTERING IS unlAWFUL,”
or any messagethat uses the word “litter.”
If the people you’re trying to reach don’tuse 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.

(03:22):
The moment you say it, you brand yourselfas an outsider. And as much as we
liberals might wish it weren’t so, humansare naturally suspicious of outsiders.
Liberalswant to believe in the Noble Savage myth:
that people are naturally trustingand cooperative.
Anthropologistssay that can be true in a group united

(03:43):
by kinship, shared interests, and culture.
But the same happy band is likely to fearor hate strangers —
and even to build its own solidaritybased on xenophobia.
It’s an instinct knownas the in-group/out-group bias.
Psychologist Fabiana Francoexplains its evolutionary origins:

(04:06):
"Favoring in-group members and
suspicion of out-group memberswas an adaptive strategy.
In-group cooperation maximized the chances
of survival for individualsand their offspring.
Suspicion and avoidance of out-groupsminimized the risk of conflict.
These strategies continue into moderntimes.

(04:26):
Many of usexhibit loyalty to sports teams, colleges,
political parties,ideologies, consumer brands,
or cultural groups in patternsthat echo ancient behaviors
despite the absence of any real physicalthreat."
Experimenters have repeatedly found
they can form random strangersinto two mutually hostile groups

(04:50):
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 reasonso many Texas anti-litter campaigns failed
might be that they used languageguaranteed to provoke in-group vs.

(05:12):
out-group hostility.
Whatever message was
intended, the one that was heard was “Youcan’t trust us.”
Tim McClure and his team knewthey had to avoid that mistake.
“Don’t Mess With Texas” fluently spokethe language of an in-group: the young,
pickup truck-driving males who researchshowed were tossing the most junk.

(05:37):
They didn’tcare about anti-litter messages.
But they cared a whole lot about Texas
and they sure didn’twant anybody messing with it.
The campaign’sfirst TV ad appeared in 1986.
You can still find it online.
It stars the legendary Texas guitaristStevie Ray Vaughan, seated under his black

(05:58):
gaucho hat in a pool of lighton a darkened stage.
The backdrop is gradually revealedto be a giant Texas flag
while Stevie Ray plays a soulful bluesversion of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon
You.” A Texan-accented voiceover joins in,
calling trash on the highways “aninsult to the Lone

(06:19):
Star state.”Cut to a closeup of Stevie Ray,
who looks up to utterthe four now-iconic words.
Texas Monthly described the result:
"[I]n the minutes after Vaughan’sperformance was first televised,
during the 1986 Cotton Bowl, TV stationsacross the state were flooded

(06:39):
with calls from viewers requesting thatthe new 'music video' be shown again."
Other ads would soonfollow, 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,

(07:02):
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 wordwas crucial.
From that knowledge flowed all the otherinsights that shaped the campaign.

(07:23):
Too many liberals have become alienatedfrom this kind of knowledge.
Too many can be counted onto say the equivalent of “litter”
instead of the equivalent of “mess,”every time. Much of my work over
the years has amounted to teaching clientsand students to stop doing that.
I’ve found that the more educatedthey are, the harder it is.

(07:45):
I’ve often introduced the topicby saying we’re
going to undo the damagethey suffered by going to college.
By thatI don’t mean to slam higher education.
But I do mean to slam our version of it,which has trapped
countless graduatesin the iron cage of alienation.
It does that by training them to speakand think in an alienated language:

(08:08):
complex, abstract, intellectualized,divorced from life.
None of our most effectivecommunicators uses that language.
To demonstrate why,I often use a passage
from one of the most powerful speechesof recent times,
but translated into the language we’retaught to use in school.

(08:28):
Here’s that denatured version.
In America, we believe
people should have physicaland economic security,
confidence in the rule of law,and the ability
to participate in a political processthat’s free of corruption.
However, these values have not yetbeen fully realized.
In this election, we must work togetherto ensure that they will be.

(08:53):
Those sentences are full of
worthy sentimentsevery 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 2004Democratic National Convention:
That is the true genius of America,
a faith in simple dreams,an insistence on small miracles.

(09:17):
That we can tuck in our children at nightand know
that they are fedand clothed and safe from harm.
That we can say what we think, writewhat we think,
without hearing a suddenknock on the door.
That we can have an ideaand start our own business
without paying a bribe.
Suddenly,the same ideas have power — enough power

(09:40):
to vault a young, freshman Senatorto 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.

(10:04):
Pay attention to your own body as we
compare phrasesfrom 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 fedand clothed and safe from harm?”
In the first case, I’ll bet,what you feel is nothing.

(10:26):
No one can feel anything about a concept,no matter
how hard they try to convince themselvesotherwise.
Now compare “confidencein the rule of law”
with “we can say what we think, writewhat we think,
without hearing a suddenknock on the door.”
Compare “a political processthat’s free of corruption” with “we can

(10:47):
have an idea and start our own businesswithout 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 chillingsound of that knock at the door,
or the anger and shame of being forcedto pay that bribe.

(11:11):
Obama spoke like a personwho lived in the real, physical world,
where you feel what happens —in your body, not in your rational mind.
And yet most educatedpeople have been trained
not to feel but to think about whatthey think they’re feeling.
Of course, sometimes we have to useconceptual language.

(11:32):
I do it when I use the word “alienation.”
But there’s a reason I often say “theiron cage” instead.
It’s hard to have a feelingabout the concept of alienation.
But it’s a different thing when you imagine yourself trapped in an iron cage.
Obamawas far from the first to figure this out.
Here’s Aristotle in about 350 BCE:

(11:55):
"The soulnever thinks without a mental image."
By “soul,“ Aristotle meant an essencethat both reasons and feels,
something like the unsplit versionof the mind described
by Antonio D’Amasio and other researcherstoday.
Plato believed that the rational mindmust subdue the body and the emotions.

(12:16):
But Aristotle arguedthat thinking is necessarily
rooted in our sensoryexperience 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;

(12:36):
show me the glint of lighton broken glass."
And yet the educated peoplewho would know who Chekov was
are likely to be alienatedfrom the very experience

he described (12:48):
the immediate, untheorized experience of being alive.
Their education has trained them
to convert experience into rationalizedthoughts about experience.
Let's assume we all speak the standardlanguage of the highly educated.
How do we describe an intense feeling,like grief?

(13:10):
First, we might say it impacts us.
An impact can be describedby 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.

(13:30):
What if the feeling is complicated?
We’ll “unpack” it.
Like we’re poststructuralist philosophers.
They have a theory that all words are likepackages that can contain any meaning.
Maybe so,but the theory is itself a package
around the feeling — and using itplaces us on the outside of the package.

(13:52):
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 everywhereyou look.

(14:13):
You’relooking at the bars of the iron cage.
The good news is the first step towardsescape
is noticing they’re there.