Negative Framing

 The conventional wisdom in the advocacy messaging world is that people don't respond to negative framings. They don't just want to hear about problems from you without clear solutions. You need to give them hope as well, in order to prompt them to take action. 

But I was talking to my dad the other day, and he raised an interesting counterpoint. He was talking about an article he had recently read that spelled out point by point the cumulative evidence we have so far about Trump's anti-democratic agenda. 

And my dad—one of the most positive people I know—said he found it cathartic to read. It gave him an emotional release, he said, just to see it all laid out somewhere. He said it reminded him of his experience dealing with patients in the hospital, when he served as a chaplain: 

"Sometimes," he said, "when you're confronting trauma, you have to start by just naming the problem." You have to lay it all out cold—before you can even start talking about solutions. 

Indeed, I find it rings true that the first step of consolation is just to describe what you're up against. I thought of James Thomson's words, in the "City of Dreadful Night," in which he describes the ultimate rationale for writing such unremittingly bleak verse: 

it gives some sense of power and passion

  In helpless innocence to try to fashion

    Our woe in living words

Giacomo Leopardi, in his great collection of pessimistic verse, the Canti, makes a similar observation—about the strange kind of emotional comfort that is to be found, simply in describing the most bitter and hopeless aspects of humanity's fate, as accurately as one can: 

the truth, once known,

though it is sad, has pleasures of its own. (Galassi trans.)

And I thought too, at last, of A.E. Housman's "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff." In the poem, after all, the author confronts a bucolic critic who accuses him of dwelling excessively on the negative. Shouldn't poetry inspire joy and dancing? Shouldn't it give comfort? 

If this rustic swain worked for a progressive advocacy organization, one can well imagine them saying: why are you focusing on problems, without giving people any solutions? Why is your framing so deficiency-oriented? Why don't you give people hope? 

To which Housman's response, in essence, is the same as my dad's—the same as Thomson's and Leopardi's: there is a kind of consolation that can only be found in first facing up to the bitter truth. You have to name what we're up against, before you can talk about overcoming it. 

if the smack [of this messaging] is sour,

The better for the embittered hour;

writes Housman. 

It should do good to heart and head

When your soul is in my soul's stead;

And I will friend you, if I may,

In the dark and cloudy day.

That is what we offer people, when we focus on the negative. There are moments in history when, I hold, this consolation is far greater and more important than the much-vaunted "power of positive thinking." And, alas, I think we are in such a moment. 

That is the first thing we have to realize—before we can even get to solutions.