Gaslight
Speaking of ethics and politeness, the difference between what one has a right to do and what is right to do – as we just were in comments on ‘A Valediction Forbidding Nonsense’ – I’ve been pondering a certain pattern of behavior which I’ve seen in a few people I know (especially, but not exclusively, in rich people I know) and find interesting. I should give it a name, for ease of reference – but it’s hard to think of one, because it’s a complicated pattern, with several steps.
Step 1. Volunteer the statement – unprompted by the other party – that you are going to do something. Perhaps something generous or kind or helpful, something extra – give a present, help with a project, loan a valuable object, perform a service, do a favour – something unexpected, welcome, significant. Collect gratitude. Or perhaps just a simple bit of routine scheduling – ‘I will do X on Thursday,’ ‘I will get Y done by the end of the month.’ Collect recognition of duty done.
Step 2. Don’t do it. Don’t give or loan or help with or perform whatever it is. Don’t do X on Thursday, don’t finish Y by the end of the month.
Step 3. Never state the fact. Never say ‘oh by the way I can’t [do whatever it is] after all.’ Never mention it or refer to it.
Step 4. Entailed by Step 3. Never explain. Since you don’t say ‘I’m not going to [do whatever it is] after all,’ it is not possible (or necessary) to explain.
Step 5. Also entailed by Step 3. Never apologize.
That’s it. Say ‘I’m going to give you A’ or ‘I will help you with B’. Then don’t do it; don’t say you’re not going to do it, you’re not currently doing it, you haven’t done it; don’t refer to it at all; ignore it entirely; act as if nothing was ever said, the subject was never mentioned; never explain why you’re not doing it, haven’t done it – much less why the reasons you haven’t done it are good reasons. Never apologize. Never do anything at all, simply proceed on your way as if nothing had happened.
Maybe I should call it ‘the Gaslight deception,’ on the theory that the goal is to make the other party think it was all a hallucination born of insanity.
People of course have a right to do this. But is it the right thing to do? I leave it to your wisdom to decide.
Well, it seems to a pattern in international aid promises.
No, of course it’s not a good thing to do.
Breaking promises, no matter how casually made, destroys trust and, in my experience, loses friends.
I agree, some are serial offenders, and they quickly get a reputaion fior making meaningless promises.
Often, it seems to me that the promises are made to make the maker feel good. He or she may even intend to do it but it isn’t important enough to remember.
People who are committed to being responsible underpromise and overperform. Unfortunately, many people do the opposite in attempting to manipulate those to whom the promises are made. My advice: Once you’ve identified someone as a maker of empty promises, cut the person off as soon as you realize a promise is being made and tell him/her to just let you know about the results after it’s done.
My proposal for naming this phenomenon:
Katrina-talk.
I’ve seen New Orleans now three plus months later – three-quarters of the city remains devastated and completely abandoned, while politicians (particularly at the federal level) do absolutely nothing they promised, but instead propose tax cuts and casinos to rebuild the city.
It’s wrong – basically just manipulating someone’s expectations. I would imagine that most who do this never have any intention of following through.
“never apologize, never explain” – I did a quick search for the origin of this quote – Disraeli? – it makes sense since I think I’ve seen it referred to in the context of British diplomacy – maybe call it the “Diplomatic Fallacy”
A quick Google search returns a lot of references to the Dubya administration – any surprise there?
Yeah, I was thinking ‘never apologize, never explain’ as I wrote (though I had no idea it was Dizzy who said it), but that wasn’t what prompted the overall thought, which is a product of bemused observation. It starts with the important bit that Disraeli left out, which entails the not apologizing and not explaining – the not mentioning the subject at all. The memory-hole approach.
The memory-hole effect is easily remedied with the reminder counter-strategy, Op! “You mentioned this last week- how far along are you with…?” Make sure you try this in company. You can be really polite but persistent. “Never explain, never apologise” can go only so far when someone is there to remind you, prod you into action, monitor and hold you to account. You may not have the serial offenders as friends for long but do you really need such losers around in the first place?
Oh, sure, the remedies are obvious enough. That’s not what the post is about. I’m just interested in the phenomenon itself – the way it works in the people who do it. (And for all I know I do it myself, since I think it’s pretty unconscious [or effectively denied, which comes to the same thing] in the people who do it – so if I’m right about that, if I do it I don’t know I do it.) And much of this observation is third party, anyway – me seeing A tell B that A is going to give or do or loan something, and B later telling me the outcome.
Just human bloody nature for too many people. I think it may be partly about paying lip service when lip service seems to be expected. And a lack of conscience; if nobody else brings it up, that’s the end of it.
Isn’t this just the sales process being applied in normal life? As in advertising the impression is more impotant than the facts.
You are dealing with a critical aspect of human achievement. The only reason it gets your remark is that you expect otherwise; our system relies on most agreements being fulfilled.
‘People’ know what they said. ‘People’ have the choice to do and not do. If this is a cynical exploitation of the social rewards of the promise, then that pattern should be repeated and the reputation of the false promiser starts to smell.
On the other hand, if its a person who is a normal underachiever, maybe they fail for other reasons than cynical exploitation. An achiever such as yourself is unlikely to empathise with such wet-ness, but leadership requires getting credible promises, and giving the interactions necessary to delivery.
…I know I do it myself, since I think it’s pretty unconscious [or effectively denied, which comes to the same thing]…
OB, I find it curious that you should use the word unconscious,not to mention the pseudo-analytic explanation, in a site with a good deal of perfectly valid criticism of Freud.
Until we find evidence of its existence, the unconscious remains another Freudian myth. Just one of the many tools in that exercise in PR, spin and manipulation that’s called psychoanalysis.
Shafika
Hmm. Well, Shafika, for one thing I did qualify the statement heavily (and your ellipse is misleading, since what is omitted is ‘for all’ before ‘I know’ – ‘for all I know’ is a far more tentative beginning than ‘I know’ is). I said ‘I think it’s pretty unconscious’ – not ‘I’m convinced it’s totally unconscious.’ That’s because I really don’t know, I only think.
And then, saying something might be unconscious isn’t quite the same as referring to the unconscious, which is a more Freudian usage. And further, the unconscious isn’t a Freudian myth anyway (apart from the ‘the’ usage). The myth is that Freud ‘discovered’ the unconscious – or rather, the fact that we’re more or less unconscious of some of our feelings and motivations. Freud wasn’t the first person to think of that. And that’s all I’m talking about. Not the mysterious Unconscious of Freud that can only be rendered conscious by trained psychoanalysts, but just the very normal everyday human habit of not paying enough attention to our own behavior and motivations. Egotistical bias, one might call it – the built-in tendency to see things from our own point of view rather than other people’s, which mutes our awareness of our own faults and amplifies our awareness of everyone else’s.
At least, it does in my case, and I’m pretty sure I’m not unusual that way.