(7) Reason and passion

RJ: Don't you think that most people see that? At some point, most everyone has looked around and realized that there's a rich guy who doesn't seem like a very nice person, and a working person who's the salt of the earth, and asked why they get treated so differently. What in this particular society cuts off people from the path you're talking about?

AO: I think we're back to affluence. People do recognize this, but then other things come into your life -- the luxuries, the job, and all that.

RJ: And at that point, the facts of the world just don't matter?

AO: What do you do when you talk to people with the facts, and it doesn't seem to have any effect? We have had a wonderful example recently, as the evidence has piled up of the [Bush] administration's lies, especially about the Iraq War. No matter how much it piled up, the basic relation of forces didn't change. He still got elected, and half the people in this country still buy his bullshit. Large numbers of fundamentally decent people support that bullshit, no matter what we say to them. Is it possible that they don't hear us? How do we reach them?

To me, the most basic way of reaching people is through the heart. The path to the mind is through the heart. Cerebral activity does not have as big a role in history as passion, as strong feelings. You can't think yourself into putting your life on the line. You've got to feel it, in your gut. But there's also a problem when people become activists, they get on the train of activism that is fueled by that passion. The very same passion that makes it possible to do it, to get on the train, makes a lot of people forget to take on their carry-on baggage, which is critical reasoning. And that's another problem I find on the left a lot -- the sacrifice of critical thought because of strong feelings of what's right and what's wrong.

RJ: You're identifying two problems: One is that sometimes we think that rational argument will produce results that it won't.

AO: Not sometimes, most of the time.

RJ: Okay, but at the same time you're also saying that people have the opposite problem on the left, which is being motivated by such strong passions that they're not always thinking critically or rationally enough. So, both things are a problem?

AO: Yes, but there's nothing we can do but try to intensify people's passionate feelings -- because there has to be something there to get us going -- while at the same time help people develop that critical reasoning. You do it by modeling it, you integrate the two.

Take a statistic like 100,000 Iraqis killed in the war. Does that change anything when people learn that? Usually not. But a picture of one little child with an arm whacked off, with very little commentary, does more to convey that horror. If someone can look at that and not have strong feelings, then you're wasting your time talking to them. After that come the facts, the analysis.

RJ: Yes, but those strong feelings are easily manipulated.

AO: Of course they are. And I'm a manipulator! That's what I've been doing. I try to manipulate people in another direction.

RJ: Does that turn it into simply a battle for who has the best manipulation? I struggle with this as a public speaker. You learn what will move people, and it's not always a good argument. Sometimes it's manipulative emotional appeals. Even when you are sure you are on the side of the angels and your cause is just, it can feel wrong, or at least I feel conflicted, when I use emotional appeals and shortchange reasoned argument. Where's the balance?

AO: You have to remember that it depends who you're talking to and what the objective is. If I'm talking to a big group, I want to educate them all if I can, but most are going to walk out with nothing really profound happening. But there will always be five, six people in an audience who will be touched in a way that they've never been touched. That's my real audience. I'm speaking to some part of them that has never been addressed. Those people, almost invariably, make a sharp turn in their lives. That's what most important right now, I think. It's about touching something that already was there in them. They were ripe, so to speak. Very few people in an audience are ripe like that; nobody can convince an entire audience to dedicate their lives to activism. I seek out the ones who are ready, and for the last 30 or 40 years, that's my principal work. The reason I speak before large audiences is to find those people.

RJ: So the goal is not to manipulate the many but touch the five or six?

AO: Yes, yes. And I always find them. It's becoming more difficult, but I've maintained connections over the years with a few hundred young people whose lives I have affected, not by planting new ideas but by touching their sensibility in a way nobody had touched. That's what teaching is about. Most teachers haven't got the tiniest fucking idea that they have the opportunity to be very important social activists. A good teacher is a social activist -- if they go beyond presenting material in the field of study and touch the humanity of people. That's what good teaching should be.

RJ: Let me tell you what was on my mind when I asked about this. Myles Horton used to tell a story about when he was young and he was a labor organizer, before he started the Highlander Folk School. As I remember the story, he said that he was in front of a big crowd -- and he was apparently fairly charismatic -- and had that feeling of having the crowd in the palm of your hand. He could get them to believe most anything. He said he stepped off the stage and vowed he would never speak like that in public again, because he didn't trust himself not to misuse that charismatic gift he had. You can be very charismatic. Do you worry about that?

AO: I had to deal with that earlier in my life, because my first attempts at public speaking were absolute disasters. I yielded to my egotism. I yielded to my love for applause. But it left me pretty empty. Somewhere along the line, I discovered that I could have a tremendous impact on some of the people in the audience, not by putting material into them -- I don't have some complete program to offer people -- but by honestly touching them.

Part 8 - Political programs and their limits

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