Читать книгу Radical Inclusion - Ori Brafman - Страница 11

To begin our investigation, we remain on Sproul Plaza but go back in time.

Twenty-two years before the Milo Yiannopoulos protests, in 1995, Ori was pulling a metal wagon along Sproul, the very spot where the agitators—whoever they were—would wage their attack. Ori normally walks with a hurried stride, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from his pace that day, which was nearly a crawl.

His load was heavy: two folding chairs, a card table, twenty stacks of pamphlets bound with thick blue rubber bands, and a dozen or so signs affixed to cardboard backing, all balanced atop a red wagon that had started its life as a toy for kids. Now, having been donated to the cause, it was covered in political stickers. The wagon’s front left and rear right wheels wobbled under the weight of its cargo. Tadamtumtruph, tadamtumtruph, tadamtumtruph, they groaned as they rolled over the smallest bumps in the concrete.

There were also psychological reasons for Ori’s slow pace. He wasn’t just pulling a heavy wagon; he was feeling heavy as well. Simply put, he dreaded arriving at his destination a few hundred feet away on Sproul Plaza, along one of two rows where student clubs “tabled” about their particular causes.

He found an open spot between the lacrosse club and an environmental group.

Ori began by unfolding the card table, then organized the pamphlets into four neat rows. Pamphlets on animal research at Berkeley were in the first row, information about the abuse of primates in the second, the philosophical arguments for animal rights in the third, and miscellaneous pamphlets explaining the history of animal rights in the fourth.

Next he put up a poster for his group: a vivid photo of a chimpanzee strapped to a metal contraption with the block-letter words BERKELEY STUDENTS FOR ANIMAL LIBERATION underneath.

He sighed. It was time for the debates to start. Ironically, Ori had joined the group to meet new people. He was putting himself through college, and to save money, rather than splurge on a dorm room, he lived on the wrong side of town with a schizophrenic who spent nights arguing with the voices in his head.

A freshman living off campus and a committed vegan, Ori had hoped he’d meet like-minded friends. Instead, here he was engaging in a debate with a biochemistry PhD candidate about the efficacy of animal studies.

“You’re all idealists who don’t know what you’re talking about,” the scientist said, his voice rising.

Ori tried to take a reasoned approach, but the tension only mounted. Meanwhile, the guy at the lacrosse table was engaged in a lengthy conversation with a tanned freshman interested in joining intramural sessions.

How Ori wished he had joined lacrosse, or even the environmental club, where a group of hippies were talking about a beach cleanup project. At least those two groups attracted potential members.

Things came to a head a few weeks later, when BSAL organized its first protest of the semester. After doing rigorous recruiting, making special signs, and obtaining a permit from the city, BSAL staged a daylong protest outside a McDonald’s. Out of the tens of thousands of Berkeley students, seven people showed up.

The tiny group held up signs showing photographs taken in slaughterhouses and gave out pamphlets describing the difficult conditions within them. The hope was that the graphic imagery would sway opinions. “Wait a second,” a passer-by might say. “I respect animals and this place tortures them?”

That conversation never happened.

Instead people engaged Ori in so-called debates, which were more like one-sided tirades about why he was wrong and/or crazy. And those who didn’t engage in such debates—the vast majority of people, that is—ignored him and his fellow protesters. And when we say ignore, we mean ignore. It was as if the animal rights activists were phantoms.

But Ori was undeterred.

By noon, the group had stood out in front of McDonald’s for three hours. They had given out hundreds of flyers but hadn’t actually dissuaded anyone from going in. Then a middle-aged woman, her kid in tow, walked toward the group.

She looked like she could be one of Ori’s mom’s friends: friendly and kind, a woman in whose home he could have grown up. The nice lady approached the group, and Ori and his peers smiled at her. Finally, here’s someone on our side, they thought. But the woman said nothing. Instead she came up to the guy standing next to Ori and literally spit in his face.

As she walked away, she yelled toward the stunned protesters, “Stuck-up elitists!”

It was an ironic epithet to hurl at a group of activists who wore secondhand clothes and persisted primarily on lentils and cabbage. But at the same time, whatever you might think of the politeness of spitting in someone’s face, the woman came from an understandable place.

Here she was trying to take her kid out for a fun, affordable meal, and a bunch of protesters were calling her immoral. Let’s face it: health food is more expensive and difficult to find than ubiquitous McDonald’s restaurants. What gave these holier-than-thou protesters the right to tell her what she should do?

If mothers were spitting at you, Ori reasoned, clearly something needed to change. He realized that he and his fellow BSAL members were losing the debate.

Over the next months, they put the protests on hold and strategized about how to actually make a difference—how to get through to the people they were trying to reach. The group came up with a number of ideas for new tactics, but Ori realized that no matter what they did, BSAL couldn’t compete with groups like the lacrosse club. It just wasn’t as . . . fun.

Then one evening Ori and his friend Leor Jacobi allowed themselves to dream.

“Imagine if we opened up a veggie burger place across from McDonald’s,” Ori said.

“With an even better playground outside,” Leor added.

“Yeah,” Ori continued. “We’d call it McVegan.”

There was a pause. A smile spreading across his face, Leor said, “We can do that.”

“Open a restaurant?” Ori asked.

“No, create the parody.” Leor spoke with alacrity. “Give veggie burgers away on Sproul.”

Leor sat down at his Mac that night and stayed glued to Photoshop for the next couple of days. The design he came up with featured the famous golden arches, but instead of the familiar slogan, it read “McVegan: Billions and Billions Saved.”

It’s important to note that just a few years earlier, unless he worked at an ad agency, Leor wouldn’t have had access to a computer able to perform this design work. But now, working in his little room at home, what he produced was . . . perfect.

McVegan represented a new tactic: create a positive narrative around being vegan. Being vegan is fun! It’s hip! All your friends are doing it! The next day Ori, Leor, and their friend Mark Schlosberg started vegan.org.

It was also the day that Ori killed BSAL. Immediately the president of every major animal rights group called him to yell at him: “You’re killing the animal rights movement!”

“Yes, that’s the idea,” he responded.

It wasn’t that he had anything against animal rights; it was just that he’d realized that the debate couldn’t be won because of the barriers it erected.

For one thing, scientists who used animals in their labs could not, by definition, be a part of the movement. That left an entire group—a group of very smart people, many of whom conducted their research in hopes of helping other people by curing a disease or gaining knowledge about health—inherently excluded. What’s more, in a debate about morality and the role of animals, could you say for sure that you were right and that the other side was wrong?

Let’s pause for a moment. Ask yourself, how many times during your personal or professional life have you been on the right side of an argument but been unable to convince others around you?

How many teams have you been a part of that felt excluded from the overall organization?

And even if you’ve never held a protest sign in your life, how many times have you felt that you were speaking to deaf ears?

Now imagine what a pain it was to teach people about veganism, of all things.

Remember that at the time, in the mid-1990s, very few people even knew the word “vegan.” This was long before the numerous studies showing the benefits of a plant-based diet. Most people knew that vegetarianism meant not eating animals, but vegans avoid all animal-derived products—no eggs, dairy, or leather.

To add to the challenges, “vegan” is not exactly a melodious word that rolls off your tongue. It’s a branding choice no marketing person would ever come up with. Ori realized that either he could earnestly make the case for giving up animal products or he could take a page from McDonald’s book.

The objective of McVegan was to make veganism inclusive—even of nonvegans. Rather than engage in a debate, it created a narrative where veganism was palatable, fun, even funny. If the fast food chain was using clowns and playgrounds to promote its food, why couldn’t Ori do the same?

Wearing T-shirts bearing the golden arches and accompanied by the McVegan mascot, Reggie McVeggie, Ori’s group gave out free veggie burgers. And after months and months of tabling for animal rights only to be ignored, suddenly the McVegan stand was mobbed by curious students.

Within an hour, they had given out more than a thousand veggie burgers. Moreover, even nonvegans, ye olde carnivores, loved the T-shirts so much that they asked to buy them. All of a sudden people loved the activists; veganism was becoming a cool, fun counterculture movement. And no one was spitting in anyone’s face.

Leor and Ori printed colorful T-shirts and stickers and started selling them to punk-rock kids at concerts. The kids would stick them on their shoes, their bikes, their hats. The logo was becoming a fun fashion accessory.

One day Ori spotted a kid on a bike with a McVegan sticker.

“Did you get that at Gilman?” he asked the kid.

“At where?” the kid answered, unaware of the alternative venue where punk rock bands like Green Day performed before they made it big. “No, dude, I got it from my friend. He gave it to me because I work at McDonald’s.”

McVegan was equally appealing to punk rockers, to people who didn’t like the idea of corporate fast food, to kids who wanted to rebel, and to those who just thought it was funny. You could wear a McVegan T-shirt and still eat a Big Mac.

Soon other colleges held their own McVegan events, inspired by the narrative.

But not everyone thought it was funny.

Many of Ori’s friends in the environmental movement argued that McVegan still encouraged consumerism. They argued that McVegan belittled a serious issue. The fact that someone could wear a T-shirt and still consume meat was evidence, they argued, that the path to societal change was to defend the facts and work toward policy changes.

The other folks who weren’t amused, unsurprisingly, were McDonald’s executives and lawyers. Just as McVegan was gaining a little bit of attention, McDonald’s threatened to sue for trademark infringement.

Uh-oh.

How can you possibly win a legal battle against McDonald’s? Leor, Ori, and Mark huddled and ultimately made the decision based on their bicycles. Specifically, the bikes were pretty much their only possessions, so what did they have to lose?

They decided to fight back, but not in the way you’d expect. They realized that, unlike their previous protests, this wouldn’t be a debate.

McVegan and Reggie McVeggie were literal clowns who were causing McDonald’s a whole lot of grief. At that point, McDonald’s had to make a choice. The natural inclination—the obvious strategy—was to get rid of the clowns, to silence them.

Indeed, that’s what McDonald’s tried to do. That’s when something weird happened. By attacking McVegan, McDonald’s was only shining light on Reggie McVeggie, only giving him more prominence and inadvertently amplifying the narrative. And McVegan was simply more fun and more hip than McDonald’s.

All of a sudden T-shirt and sticker orders were coming in from around the world.

That’s when Ori had a fundamental realization: as the under-dog, it’s easier to engage in a war of narratives than it is to win a debate on the merits.

Because McVegan was inclusive, because anyone could be a part of it, there was no one (other than McDonald’s) who was terribly offended by it or set against it. After a number of positive news stories broke, reporters were calling to get the McVegan side of the story. But rather than engage in a debate, Ori dressed up as Reggie McVeggie and held a press conference.

The next day McDonald’s dropped its case.

Now, what if McDonald’s had chosen a different strategy? Rather than trying to win the debate, what if it had recognized that it was engaged in a battle of narratives?

This is the first major element of the new environment shaping our world. Narratives, as we’ll see, are having greater and greater impact in industries and on the world political stage alike. More specifically, the world is moving from debates about facts to battles of narratives.

Facts are about being right or wrong. McDonald’s believed it was wrong for McVegan to have infringed the trademark. But narratives aren’t as concerned with who is right and who is wrong; they’re focused on who’s more interesting.

Facts are by definition grounded in logic. Narratives, however, are based on emotions. McVegan wasn’t about whether it’s logical to eat a beef burger or a soy alternative. It was simply declaring that the alternative was fun. McVegan was powerful in the same way that a clown in a circus has power, or a jester in a royal court. A jester could mock the king by distilling one attribute, twisting it, and giving it a new (and funny) interpretation. Reggie McVeggie gave a new spin to Ronald McDonald: what if healthy eating were fun?

Facts need to be verified in order to have utility. But narratives gain power merely by spreading. Each punk-rock kid who put a McVegan sticker on his or her bike to protest commercialism spread the narrative; as did each McDonald’s employee who did so as a joke. Thus McVegan mutated and could be both a critique of fast food and a good-natured spoof.

Unlike facts, no one expects narratives to be exacting. They are derivatives of the truth, not pure versions of it. Thus they’re allowed to be more flexible and agile, because they spread by being interesting, not necessarily by being accurate. They don’t have to be scientifically on point; they just need to have a compelling plot.

This brings us to the core of the issue. Facts depend on expert validation to persist, while narratives simply need to be retold. That means that you can’t win a narrative battle by simply proving that the opposing narrative is in some way inaccurate. A narrative battle is won by drowning out the countermessage.

Imagine if instead of viewing McVegan and Reggie McVeggie as adversaries to be silenced, McDonald’s had taken a page from Shakespeare’s King Lear, who noted that “jesters do oft prove prophets.” In other words, what if McVegan was onto an emerging trend?

Indeed, while Ori hasn’t done any work on McVegan since 1995, the concept endured. In 2015 industry publication AgWeb posted an article with a title that would have seemed impossible two decades earlier: “McVegan: Former McDonald’s CEO Joining Board of Beyond Meat” (a veggie burger maker). Don Thompson, former McDonald’s CEO, had turned veggie burger enthusiast.

It wasn’t necessarily that Thompson had a philosophical change of heart about burgers—rather, he was following market demands. He wasn’t the only business executive who warmed up to veggie burgers. Bill Gates joined a version of the McVegan campaign as well. More on that later. The point is that veganism, thanks to inclusive narratives, is no longer on the fringe of society. In fact, just a few weeks before this book went to press, news broke that McDonald’s itself was testing a new vegan burger. Its name? The McVegan.³

What if McDonald’s had amplified rather than tried to squelch McVegan, and what if it had developed the veggie burger first and capitalized on that market potential?

The argument here isn’t that we should welcome various ideas—even those that are seemingly clownish and out of left field—for the sake of being “nice.” Rather, through inclusion companies can both react to market forces that are demanding a voice and stay competitive. Think how much easier it would have been for McDonald’s to tap its marketing team instead of its lawyers, boosting the McVegan message—even celebrating it—and bringing the narrative under McDonald’s own tent.

Facts	Narratives
Right or wrong	Interesting or boring
Logical	Emotional
Verified	Spread
Stay rigid	Easily mutate
Precise truth	Approximation of truth
Objective	Subjective
Depend on experts	Depend on retelling
Countered by disproving	Countered by drowning out
Tendency to exclude	Tendency to include

This idea of broadening one’s scope to be more inclusive in the quest for greater effectiveness is what led to this book. It’s what led General Dempsey to reach out to a peace-studies-Berkeley-teaching-tofu-eating person like Ori to get his help improving the U.S. military’s ability to function effectively.