Connect with the Elephant

not the rider.

In 2010, I was in the back of a jeep at the Yankari Game Preserve¹ when I saw my first ‘elephant’ elephant. Not the elephants that used to ‘stroll’ through Baltimore back in the day or the ones I’d seen at circuses growing up, but a real honest to god giant elephant with the tusks and ‘whatchya think I’m going to do now?’ expression.

It was pretty pretty pretty cool. For me. Not so much for my Nigerian friend who’d been leading our group around as we visited a Youth Conference in Kwarhi. He was, as the kids might say it … losing his #%$^.

I laughed. I actually laughed. This amazing animal was off to the side of the jeep, I had my camera on burst mode, and he was climbing the walls to get away. As the jeep drove on, I asked what the big deal was and he turned and said ‘an elephant killed my brother.’

Yeah. I wasn’t laughing any longer.

For some people in some places elephants don’t wear tiaras, dance on stools, or balance balls. They don’t hold onto each other’s tails as they parade past the last of the morning beer rush at Lexington Market. They don’t look really sad in the eyes as you ride the circle at Renn Fest — for some people in some places, an elephant killed their brother.

Is it a bad time to tell you that my last Post had a Part II?

This one is not 37 paragraphs long - this one kept the other one from being 60. When I was thinking about communities, I was thinking about what I saw as good ways to build a community growing up. Some have read that as somehow saying that those basketball games were really intentional efforts to manipulate kids - not so. It’s likely that over the past several hundred years sectarian groups had to think of ways to acculturate - to figure out how to pass on the culture of a particular society from infancy. Megachurches do the same thing - they understand Dunbar’s Number² (or at least the concept) and develop small groups within a larger community in order preserve cohesiveness. Does that mean that the small group is meant to manipulate? No. It means the small group is the eventuality of some earlier intentional effort to keep the group together.³

So the post discussed acculturation and reflected on some of what I’d observed before switching gears and thinking about other ways to acculturate - the building of barriers. From there, I took aim at the real question — why do people stay in groups when confronted with the reality that there had been a bait and switch? That led to the discussion of cognitive rigidity versus flexibility.

I really wanted to think about something that seems to go hand-in-hand with cognitive rigidity but I looked at a Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter and it was … 27 paragraphs long … and I knew I had a problem.

That something was this post - a side trip to a land where the elephants all tend to injure and there is no tiara in the bunch. There we look at how we interact with each other - how members of different tribes and communities make sense of those tribes.

In 2007, psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science. One of the book’s takeaways is the ‘elephant and the rider’ theory.

In theorizing about how your brain works, Haidt suggested that there is an irrational part (an elephant) and a rational part (the rider). Haidt’s theory, simplified, goes something like this: There is this part of you that is irrational, driven by emotion, difficult to control, and plodding forward - that is the elephant. Then there is a rational part of you, trying to make good decisions, evaluating possibilities, and discerning - that is the rider. Between the rider and the elephant, as much as the rider might think he or she is in control, we all know who is in charge.

Haidt didn’t invent the lightbulb, but he improved it. Philosophers have been trying to develop a metaphor that explains why we act the way we do for millenia. In 370 B.C. Plato wrote Phaedrus and the Charioteer. In his Charioteer Allegory, Plato said that the soul was like a chariot, the Charioteer (the driver) was reason, and the chariot was being pulled by two horses - think of those as your ‘good angel’ horse and your ‘bad angel’ horse. It makes a lot of sense — you are going along constantly trying to discern between the pull of one versus the other … except … Haidt would suggest that you are making the mistake of thinking the rider is the driver and giving her too much control.

In a world where the gods were directing the affairs of men, Plato gave the Charioteer control. But the world turned, at least in our part of the world, and I think Haidt would suggest that people have gone from thinking that they have too little to too much control. That causes problems for each of us in both how we view our own decision making and in how we interact. Did I say this was Part II of my last post? I meant to say it was part whatever of my first post. These questions about social media, community, and cognition all merge for me - usually after I’ve just commented on someone’s post, etc., and check in with how I am feeling.

Not the zen, flip the rain stick checking in mind you, the ‘why am I so pissed off?’ kind.

I’m often a mix of disappointed and mad at those check-ins. And I don’t think I am the only one. Wherever you find yourself on whatever spectrum (politics, religion, perspectives on community activities, freecycle and community yard sale groups, even talking about how to plant a garden!), it’s the same. We interact with someone in another ‘tribe’ (or maybe even a different part of our own tribe) and feel like we are butting our head against a wall. It’s not just that someone disagrees with us, its that they don’t even see us. They disregard our experience and education. They dismiss our concerns. They treat us as the enemy if we don’t march lockstep with them.

That makes me mad.

They cast us aside in favor of others they don’t know based on information they have largely accepted without critical examination. Often, in the process, they cast aside years - even decades - of relationships, of shared experiences, of knowing where ‘we come from’ — all because of adherence to new tribe rules and new tribe rulers.

That is disappointing - maybe in others for not valuing relationships with those they know over those they don’t - maybe disappointment in myself for not really knowing what other people believed about the world in the past.

The disappointed and mad metastasize when they merge with the frustration of not being able to change minds — or even have a conversation.⁴

But I think a lot of that is on me (and likely us).

Enter the elephant. This huge difficult to control part of you that tends to go anywhere it wishes. The elephant is that emotional side - firmly rooted in trust, identity, and intuitive thinking. Sitting on top of the elephant is the rider, reins in hand. That rational side is rooted in logic, evidence, and persuasion.

We have a huge problem of talking to riders instead of elephants.

Our elephants are tough to steer. They aren’t going where they don’t want to go and when that emotionality and intuition are charging in one direction, it is tough enough for your rider to have an impact on your elephant - imagine how successful it is when someone else’s rider starts popping off. If your elephant is centered in identity, what happens when that identity is threatened?

With your elephant and rider, the rider can have an impact, but the climate has to be right. The elephant has to feel safe or curious - it has to be open to direction and suggestion. Think about the last time you were spinning with emotion or paralyzed with anxiety and worry. What brought you down? Did anything? Any of us who have been awake worried in the middle of the night know that logic and rationality aren’t soothing - they aren’t your comforting friends. They are your Gilbert Godfreys as opposed to Alan Sklars. There has to be something that takes the edge off, maybe breathing, maybe prayer, maybe a gummy, maybe medication so that the space opens up to introduce even a few rational thoughts and get the elephant to move in another direction.

If there is anything to that, take it outside of yourself and think about how you interact with your partner or a close friend or family when their elephant is charging? You know what I mean. If someone close to you is spinning with anxiety, worry, fear, or anger, how useful is it for you to throw some rationality or logic into the mix? You might be absolutely right, but do you find that makes the spinning speed up or wind down? Be honest.

Things go into hyperdrive and now, in addition to having someone worried or anxious or scared, you likely also have someone mad at you. In fact, a lot of that charging around that the elephant was doing now has purpose, there is a bullseye on Mr. or Ms. ‘well, you know I read ….’

Now let’s take things to our tribal/community level. It seems that we often try to persuade before we have ever even thought about the elephant - let alone whether the climate is right for logic and rationality (and this goes for everyone, especially the 10% at either extreme on Facebook - the ‘doom posters’ as I have heard them called as opposed to the 80% of the ‘doom scrollers’). An example would be the person who posts about prices at their grocery store only to be met with the comment about how the data shows the economy is really doing great. I am guilty of that one - a repeat offender.

In response to that comment, how many times have you seen the original poster say ‘hey, that makes sense, I guess I didn’t understand the price tags at the store I was just in.’ Yeah. Me neither. We often try to speak to the rider, thinking that it is the rider who is in control. We are hoping to change the direction of the elephant without doing anything to make sure the climate right. Now let’s be clear - having the right climate doesn’t mean that I am right and the other person is wrong or that they will capitulate. Having the right climate might mean that there is less doubling down, fewer accusations, and less defensiveness. Maybe.

Remember, the elephant is all about trust, intuition, and identity. So to have any hope of a conversation you have to build trust and find common ground.

What if instead of speaking to rider, we spoke to the elephant? Something like, ‘that’s really rough. I’m glad we have our chickens - but then there are feed costs. I don’t really get how things can be so good in the company’s retirement plan but other things in the economy be going sideways ….. I’m worried about how the families that don’t have all that we do are going to make it.’ In short, if an elephant is talking egg prices, talk egg prices - tell your rider to shut up about the S&P.

Is that the only answer, of course not. But what if we acknowledged that things aren’t black and white - that there are all sorts of shades of gray. What if we tried to acknowledge the elephant that is charging before introducing our truth?

And not in a manipulative and fake way.

But here is the big question - can you even allow yourself room to acknowledge the gray in issues, or are you starting from a point of absolutism before you even interact with anyone else? If you are thinking in absolutes, then it is more likely that in any interaction, your elephant is going to be primarily focused on not ceding ground, and in that case, it does not really matter whether you are connecting with someone else’s elephant or their rider, because you might be the problem.

Just a thought.

1. Bauchi State, Nigeria.

2. The idea that once you hit 150, the ability to maintain cohesiveness drops - or the idea that there is a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

3. Of course, sometimes it is an immediate fix - also not manipulative, though it can be - we have all been at family events or amongst friend groups where we see things slipping and say ‘we have to get together more often …’ and know that even our tiny little group cannot survive without intentional effort.

4. It is going around that a sure-fired way to spot AI is the use of ‘em’ dashes (that’s the long hyphen) in posts. That is silly. I like ‘em’ dashes because I am already comma happy and where would it stop. Also, any AI worth its salt could likely write this post in a paragraph or two.