One thing life has taught me is, it’s very hard to get people to do things that they don’t want to do. It is also very hard to stop people from doing things that they do want to do.
If you wish to influence other people’s behavior, you can of course take the mechanical approach of using force to suppress one activity and demand another. This works, sort of. You can also take the logical argument approach, and hope that people can overcome their basic desires. Like weight loss diets, this works occasionally, but for the most part . . . it doesn’t.
If you wish to truly effectively manage other people’s behavior, you’re much better off if you can influence the initial emotion that is driving their behavior in the first place.
When I was a professional musician, I learned a great deal about the emotional structures of human beings. Being a professional performer requires one to be something of a psychologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. You spend a lot of time wondering what it is that makes an audience do what it does, and how to make them behave the way you want them to, without them knowing you’re doing it. There are many skills involved in this, but one facet that I would like to touch on today is the emotion of loyalty.
Loyalty may very well be one of the most important aspects of human nature that one needs to understand if one is to effect any change at all. This is because loyalty to the past very often trumps common sense or healthy self-interest.
To start, human beings, for the most part, have a tremendous need to be loyal to something. Large organizations, especially large non-profits, generally understand this. People will pay more money for a brand name product not for any logical reason, but solely out of brand loyalty. Some people will drink one brand of beer and no other because denying themselves the pleasure of other kinds of beer is, to them, a demonstration of their superior loyalty, and that feeling– of being "more loyal"– has value all by itself.
We learn to be loyal to many things… for example, most people are incredibly loyal to their family system and traditions, even if those family traditions are not the best logical choice. And of course, loyalty to one’s country is highly laudable.
On the flip side, disloyalty is pretty much always considered to be a bad thing. To paint something as disloyal is a great way of suppressing that behavior.
Of course, when speaking of disloyalty, one of the greatest instances of disloyalty in modern history is the Declaration of Independence. It is important to remember that there were an awful lot of people who thought that the Declaration of Independence was a very, very bad thing, as it was, from one point of view anyway, incredibly disloyal. But, with 20/20 hindsight, and also in the context of a country where it would be tremendously disloyal to say it was disloyal at the time, everyone approves of it now.
The reason I talk so much about loyalty versus disloyalty is that, most people tend to be loyal to the systems of the past. Loyalty is often a more powerful force than logic or common sense or self-interest. If we are being loyal, it feels right. But to be innovative, creative, and truly original requires that we be disloyal to the way people did things before us. And so it can feel wrong. It is this feeling of wrongness, this aversion to being disloyal, not any logical reason, that all too often puts a damper on original thinking and bold decisive action.
There is no easy answer to this. However, when one encounters conflict between doing the same old thing and trying something totally new and different, I think it helps a lot if one is cognizant of these universal elements of the typical human emotional operating system. At the very least, I hope you will always remember that there are people who DO understand your need to be loyal, and they will exploit it if you let them.
The next time you find yourself doing something that is not in your best interest, like eating or drinking more than you should, stop and ask yourself this question: am I doing this out of logic, or am I doing it out of loyalty, to my friends, to my family, or to an advertisement I saw on television? Loyalty is a fine thing, and there’s no shame in discovering that you’re doing something out of loyalty rather than sensible self-interest.
But as Thomas Jefferson once said (and we all must be loyal to him, right?),
"A little revolution now and then is a good thing."
© Justin Locke
