PARADOXING

In the early days of September 88′ I drove from Cedar Rapids,  to my old home town. I wanted to visit some people and my parents let me stay at their house.  Upon arrival, my dad’s face was very red. He had a fistful of envelopes from retired colonels and generals. In the letters, these former military people said that colleges and universities were filled with Communists. Would my father  send ten or fifteen dollars ? This would help them fight Communists. Incidentally, at the time Rush Limbaugh was not on national radio, and the cold war was winding down.

As a college professor, what did I think of those letters? For once, I finally got it right. I agreed and said there should be a diversity of opinions in the classroom. He blinked.” I did not mean it,” he said” No , I said that would be fine, but I did not think that the former military folks were sincere.” That they would put his name on a petition and send it to his Congressman. Regardless of the Congressional Representatives, the public official would give the letters to his secretaries and then they would recycle the letters. Those military folks in the meantime could make a lot of money. My mother entered the conversation and indicated that he should give the money to their church.  I said nothing.

So what was I doing? It is called paradoxing or reverse psychology. As best you can, you agree with the agitated person. When I was younger, I belonged to a social fraternity. We were taught paradoxing. We had a rival fraternity that was very tough. In all the school events, either they won or we did. I liked a lot of them.  However, they took the bait. They jumped right in and rather talk about themselves, they said some lousy things about us. In return,  we would say,  we thought they were pretty good and one should choose a group that you felt most comfortable. We ended with that we thought we were a little bit better, but that was their decision.  

If they chose the rival group, we would be sure to congratulate them and indicate that if they were unhappy they were welcome to come back if they changed their mind during the semester.

 As indicated earlier, my father was a gentle soul who started as a book keeper in an allied chemical company and 50 years later was branch manager in the same corporation with a territory similar to western Europe. He was enamored by the Great Free Private Enterprise, and to him, I was soft on Communism. Well I wasn’t. I had been to Soviet Union embassy in Washington DC and had studied it. It was mean and it did not work. It was left of center fascism.

However, what I learned from all this is that paradoxing can save you so much trouble, if not your job. We live in a tense time. A timeline Gallup poll indicates that Americans were most happy in 1965. At that time, the difference between the worker and CEO was 20 times greater. Vietnam was just beginning. The USA was the richest country in the  world.

Well things didn’t quite turn out the way that we thought. Lots of people are mad and shock radio encourages even more anger Thus, you are likely to get in trouble. So if you would like to be happy and not always right, there is a strategy in paradoxing. Take the comment and turn it inside out.