Hunting the Organ Grinder Monkey
Written on 24 April 2008
Week of April 22
“Online Dating is a fantastic hunting ground for irrational behavior,” says Dan Ariely, author of beststelling Predictably Irrational.
You can begin this research with yourself, but you may be the last predictably irrational customer you understand. Your irrationalities make perfect sense to you. IRR for short. When you look for your own IRR, you only see what other people have told you. Your IRR are invisible to you under the category of IRR.
Doubly invisible because like predatory lizards we see mainly movement. The predictable hardly changes, hardly moves.
But that insight may be all you need. To your customers, their IRR make perfect sense, and are invisible to them under the category of IRR.
You know the look on someone’s face when you mention your IRR. “There he goes again. Here comes the organ grinder and his dancing monkey.”
Your IRR is a well-rehearsed song and dance. The simple truth is simple to remember, but an IRR needs frequent rehearsal, if only in your head, while you pace in your robe and slippers. You turn that crank thousands of times.
You see the look on the other face (“What a crank!”) and stop yourself. “Don’t get me started.”
We repeat our worst mistakes because they need the most repetition.
Online dating then. And politics. Good places to hunt the organ grinder monkey, and for similar reasons.
In online dating, remember, you see only what you’re shown, and know only what you’re told.
My sister describes how she met the man she raised five daughters with: “I just noticed him across the room and knew.”
In online dating you don’t just notice across the room. You get a tiny presentation of him(her). Of and by him(her). Tightly rehearsed. You get how he sees, not how you would, or others would. You get his organ grinder monkey. You get his IRR.
If you live in New Hampshire or Iowa, maybe you have glimpsed a presidential candidate across the room. Otherwise, politics is like online dating. A great hunting ground for the organ grinder monkey.
Example from today: “McCain Says Government Isn’t Poverty’s Sole Solution.” A newsman wrote those words. McCain himself probably doesn’t start a sentence “McCain says….”.
In his own words, McCain says nearly the opposite:
I cannot claim that the circumstances of our lives are similar in every respect, Mr. McCain told an exuberant crowd packed into an upstairs room of the Martin County Courthouse, which had been painted and freshened up with flowers for the occasion. I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours.
This is Inez, Kentucky. Hatfield and McCoy country. That last line is flattery, plain and simple. Otherwise, it’s a telling admission.
The Senate is goverment. The Navy is government. Your accountant works for the government, at one remove. He administers IRS rules. Your bankruptcy lawyer works for the government, again at one remove. When your bankruptcy lawyer voted in 2000, he wasn’t voting for Bush, he was voting for the Bush bankruptcy law. Your real estate broker and mortgage broker were voting for no-rules loans (so was the bankruptcy lawyer). They work for government at one remove.
But what about entrepreneurs? Small businesses, large businesses? Donald Diamond is a wealthy real estate investor in McCain’s home state of Arizona. Surely for him government is not poverty’s sole solution?
Donald R. Diamond, a wealthy Arizona real estate developer, was racing to snap up a stretch of virgin California coast freed by the closing of an Army base a decade ago when he turned to an old friend, Senator John McCain.
When Mr. Diamond wanted to buy land at the base, Fort Ord, Mr. McCain assigned an aide who set up a meeting at the Pentagon and later stepped in again to help speed up the sale.
A deal like that can make or break you for a lifetime. And the lifetimes of your grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and so on. For this real estate developer, government was poverty’s sole solution. The only solution he would ever need, or his descendants for generations to come.
How about jet engineers? If the Iraq war costs 12 billion dollars a month, someone gets that 12 billion. If that’s you, and your business is war, you don’t vote for Bush or McCain, you vote for war. This war, another war, any war. War any way you can get it. You work for government at one remove. For you, goverment is poverty’s sole solution. The only solution you will ever need.
McCain went to Inez because President Johnson announced his War on Poverty there.
I have no doubt President Johnson was serious and had the very best of intentions when he declared the war on poverty in America,” Mr. McCain said. “But the army that he enlisted was mostly drawn from the ranks of government bureaucracies.”
Look around at the Republicans you know personally. How many live off government in one form or another?
I have no doubt that John McCain was serious and had the very best of intentions when he rallied voters to the Republican Party. But the voters he enlisted were drawn mainly from the ranks of government bureaucracies, at one remove.
So for McCain and his party, the headline becomes:
Government is Poverty’s Sole Solution
GOP…?
Government Opportunity Party.
