Yesterday brought an email from a disgruntled client – sent via a lawyer who is most likely just a friend doing him a favor – demanding a refund.
This is the kind of thing that I don’t see business owners discuss very much.
Yet, inside a business that we’ve run coming up on 10 years now (which in internet years feels like 100) – the bottom 0.3% of clients present a constant threat to team morale and effectiveness.
I won’t get into the details of the message from this client and his lawyer.
The notable element for today’s purposes came in the way this client represented our core strategy for helping our clients succeed in private practice.
His entire argument hinges on a strawman interpretation of one element of our curriculum.
Instead of a “steelman” approach where he presented the strongest and most robust possible interpretation of the element in question…his letter caricaturized this piece of our strategy. He’s both wrong and acting in bad faith. (And of course he is.)
I stumbled across another example of strawmanning on social media yesterday in which the inevitable occurred: a political post’s comment section degenerated (quickly) into strawman argument after strawman argument. Another reminder that it rarely pays to even notice comment sections…let alone wade down into them.
There’s a strawman epidemic afoot.
While dumbing down perspectives you don’t agree with has always been an option, the internet in its current dilapidated state has enabled strawmanning to run roughshod across a million forum threads and social media comment sections. It’s practically the “coin of the realm” in what passes for intellectual discourse among the laypeople of this 21st century period.
To make sure we’re all on the same page here, to “strawman” an opposing perspective is to dumb it down so it’s easy to defeat in an argument. You distort the opposing view, drain out its nuance and complexity, and then you trounce the pale shadow that’s left so as to “win” the “argument.”
Strawmanning is so easy to do.
Particularly with an opposing perspective you vehemently disagree with.
And yet…it weakens you and cheapens your argument.
In this specific instance, it’s not worth the trouble to point out how silly and dumb this particularly soon-to-be former client’s representation of our work is.
I’ve learned that the best thing you can do with the bottom 0.3% is send them on their way out into their field of failure as quickly as possible – even when it costs you thousands of dollars. And especially when the outcome ultimately amounts to outright theft – of money, yes, but also time and optimism and confidence (if you let the bottom 0.3% get to you in that way).
If you want to avoid falling into the behavior patterns of the bottom 0.3%, refusing to strawman your opponents’ arguments is one simple thing you can do.
Instead, present any oppositional perspective in its most rigorous possible form.
Argue against their actual position. In all its nuance.
Doing so usually teaches you quite a lot. Reveals some blind spots you didn’t know you had.
It also makes you a better thinker. You hop out of the deeply grooved way of thinking about things that is where you most likely spend the majority of your time.
This is an integral maneuver – seeing things through more than just the one perspective you’re accustomed to.
And integral effort has the potential to spur your evolution forward up and out of the fixed mental positions that characterize the earlier phases of human perspectival development. (See Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, for more on this vast topic.)
So, you get at least three big benefits when you refuse to strawman:
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You’ll be having an authentic debate with the actual argument you oppose (rather than wasting your time while filling the world with yet another bad-faith argument).
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You’ll be comporting yourself with dignity by granting your opponent the respect they deserve as someone (like you) doing their best to figure stuff out in an environment where sense-making is under massive assault.
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And you’ll loosen the constrictions of your typical way of looking at things – thereby opening yourself up to ways of seeing and hearing and thinking and feeling that might not come natural, but that may ultimately help you in your own path of becoming more than you are right now.
We can’t control whether others strawman their life away.
But we can choose the better alternative.