"Scary, dangerous stuff"

 Today, I received a fundraising email from one of the innumerable progressive advocacy and Democratic Party-aligned mailing lists that I never directly signed up for, but who possess my information nonetheless through some web on online connections. In only three words, the message's subject line managed to encapsulate everything that is flawed and vaguely annoying about nonprofit marketing communications. It read simply: "Scary, dangerous stuff."

Did it "work"? Yes, I suppose I clicked on it. Did I want to know what this dangerous and scary stuff might be? Okay, sure, I read through it enough to find out. And did it live up to the hype? Did its subject matter really amount to "scary, dangerous stuff" after all? Yes, I suppose I would have to say so again. It was talking about unprecedented voter suppression measures being enacted by right-wing state legislatures around the country, which surely are both scary and dangerous. 

Yet one could scarcely point to a marketing communication from similar lists that didn't assert for itself equivalent claims for drama and urgency. Indeed, the "scary, dangerous stuff" message was better than some. At least it was referring to actual events. Others I've received from Democratic fundraisers simply announce in their subject line hypothetical horrors, as if they had already transpired; or even worse, try to stoke preemptive schadenfreude ("[So-and-so] HUMILIATED!!!")

And of course, nonprofit fundraisers write this way because it works. As much as people profess to desire "positive messaging" and stories of success or kindness, we don't click on it when it arrives. We are hard-wired to respond to signals of alarm and danger. Pointing to a potential threat is a surer way to generate interest, if it convinces, than the alternatives. After all, who is likely to click on an email subject line reading simply: "Everything's fine."

Nonprofit marketers know this better than anyone. As M+R sums up the psychological consensus in one of their guides to writing nonprofit creative: "Our brain’s negativity bias makes us more likely to pay attention to threats. We’re more motivated to avoid loss than we are to try and gain something." So the easiest path to snagging the reader's attention and prompting them to act is often to imply that unless they take action right now, a loss of something they value is imminent. 

On the other hand, they point out the various familiar downsides to exclusively deploying this approach. One risks exhausting one's audience by trying to key them up to a constant state of anxiety. And then there's the problem of crying wolf. We could call this the threat value inflation that sets in when every news cycle is treated as apocalypse. It becomes harder, in this rhetorical ecology, to differentiate the really severe and breaking threats when they do arise from the constant welter of alarmism. 

All of which is tricky to sort out in our present historical moment because many of us no doubt (myself included) feel that we are living through a period of history in which a more or less constant state of alarm is warranted. If threat inflation has set in, therefore, we could well ask: is it because we have been manipulated by skilled media alarmists? Or simply because we're actually living through an extreme and new set of interlocking crises: pandemic, climate change, and the mainstreaming of far-right extremism in U.S. politics. 

I'm not going to sit here and pretend any of us should be less alarmed by these things. Indeed, for the most part it is clear that people are not alarmed enough. But I do think it's worth asking ourselves whether—by contributing to threat inflation and the diminishing marginal returns of rhetorical invocations of alarm and danger—we are not contributing to precisely this excess of apathy in our society. It's crying wolf again. If our messaging has treated everything as a disaster, why should people believe us when the real McCoy comes along?

 Secondly, we should reflect on the implications of M+R's wording when they describe the nature of our cognitive "negativity bias." Recall how they put it: "We’re more motivated to avoid loss than we are to try and gain something." Now, this is undoubtedly true. It's one of the more salient features of my own highly risk-averse psychology, so far be it from me to condemn it in anyone else, or to blame marketers for appealing to it. But it should also be obvious what a profoundly conservative psychological factor it is. 

Joseph Conrad sums this up well in a passage from his novel Nostromo. Describing a character's growing obsession with a silver mine in the fictional country of Costaguana, he notes the man came to regard this business investment as a distinct burden, even though it imposed no greater demands on his personal finances than prior ventures. Conrad explains this odd fact as follows: "[M]an is a desperately conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty of this outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities."

Indeed; "desperately conservative" is the right way to describe the human tendency to fear losing what we have more than desiring what we might gain. And when this tendency of ours is appealed to in political communications—even by progressive organizations—the result can only be conservative in turn. 

In Albert O. Hirschman's writings on the "rhetoric of reaction," after all, he describes as one of the prototypical right-wing arguments the invocation of "jeopardy." The rhetorical device goes like this: beware of some proposed social change because, if it happens, the result will be to negate and destroy some earlier societal advance. 

And since this argument is primarily pitched at forestalling some emergent social change, it is of course a device preferred by the political right: the partisans of "reaction." But—my point today is—so long as progressives rely on the cognitive negativity bias and the fear of loss in their communications, they are deploying a version of the jeopardy thesis as well, and appealing in much the same way to the "reactionary" instincts of the human animal.

So long as we rely exclusively on the invocations of threats, alarms, and fears of imminent loss in our communications, that is to say, the result can only be conservative. The specifics of what progressives are conserving may be different from what right-wingers are trying to conserve: Roe v. Wade, in our case, or the Voting Rights Act. But the battles we are fighting with these weapons will by definition only ever be rearguard and defensive. 

Which is not necessarily or in all circumstances a bad thing. Sometimes, what we have is worth holding onto, and the proposed alternatives are worse. There are times when any of us should be a small-c conservative, and that is when we are confronted with something worth conserving. But we should not spend so much time stoking fear of loss that we forget to enunciate or discuss what it is we want to add to existing institutions, not just what to preserve. Because if the political left is not willing to articulate that vision, who will?