I have been thinking lots about positions v. objectives, which is something that came up for me while learning about negotiation specifically and dispute resolution (law school energy) more generally. In the negotiation context the ‘position’ often is posited as obscuring the ‘objective.’ I think unpacking this angle of it will do more than your definitional exercise, orrrrrr, the definitional exercise will be more purposeful with this additional perspective:
So we’ll call a ‘position’ what you /say/ you want, what you’ve been trained to say. It’s what you walk to the negotiation table with and say, I’ll give you X if you give me Y. The contents of X and Y are your position. Your objective is often a little less concrete, and might be framed as what you ‘really’ want or really find acceptable, which might not be apparent or may be deliberately obscured when opening a negotiation. The objective might be a little more like ‘be happy’ ‘get my client what they told me to get’ ‘make it to the end of the work day’ ‘enable specific division of my company to act on developing a product that makes me and my shareholders money’ and so forth.
The negotiation exercise I did where this was illustrated most clearly was like, mock negotiations, basically bids, between two pharma companies competing for the supply chain of an exotic plant. Your position for A Corp. was ‘get the plant’ and the stated/presumed presumption of the person representing B Corp. was ‘get the plant.’ Knee jerk competitive negotiation over the position basically results in impossible bids and huge expenses and no party can really leave the exchange profitably. But diligent and open negotiations with lots of information reveals, AHA! Corp. A’s product only uses the stem, and Corp. B’s product only uses the flower. Both corps had more specific objectives than they let on in their positions (for reasonable fears regarding trade secrets blah blah); yet once they were able to work honestly from their objectives a deal was possible even when the positions dictated there would be no middle ground.
I find some of these misused political and ideological terms (democracy marxism communism DEI CRT fascism capitalism & al.) are people’s first attempts at stating positions. They largely learned their positions from their trusted news sources and policy wonks, no one really has time to interrogate the ideas, it can be questionable how much any of this impacts day to day life, so people come into discussions with ‘positions’ that are highly invested in ideological distinctions that they dooooooon’t quite grasp. Or ideological positions that openly invite confusion and conflict regarding their premises.
Then proceeds the sparring. I want democracy which is not what you want because I perceive your actions to represent fascism. You say you want democracy but I don’t trust you because the consequences of the policies your ideologues champion… harm aspects of the social order that I think are vital to democracy. And so on.
But when people get moved away from the vague and nebulous position of supporting democracy (which as you are insightfully pointing out represents a network of ideas and viewpoints that aren’t perfectly consonant), to a real objective which typically looks like ‘change policy that I perceive to be hurting me’, okay, then we can have a real discussion about the pros and cons of that policy. Who is bearing the costs and is that just and can we shift those costs more consciously and fairly. Or is there a misunderstanding about the policy and the data surrounding it that can be explained or contextualized. And the power of this shift is DOUBLE TRUE if the policy can be addressed on its own, rather than as some manifestation of a party line where the ideological commitment tries to lock the relationship between position and objective.
And approaching it this way saves us from having to DEFINE democracy - instead we can use rubrics like you laid out, oh, hmm, from this person and this perspective, their democratic commitment likely means they are engaging the policy from /this/ perspective, rather than /that/ perspective which may be true of my friends’ views of democracy but may not be that widely held of a view. Knowing others’ definitions of democracy (without committing ourselves to saying democracy can or cannot be what they define it as) helps get the discussion from position to objective while raising fewer hackles. And skirting the definitional issue, and/or permitting expansive definitions… it also saves us from things like believing democracy demands a stance on the electoral college, when in fact the arguments for and against the electoral college can each be quite democratic and the decision for or against can be made using democratic/(mass voting participation under a constitutional rubric) techniques.
A lot of people talk past each other because they use the word democracy when they actually mean liberalism, or fealty to the constitution or rule of law - both of which can just as easily be seen as *limits* on democracy. Some conservatives will say that since Trump was elected, anything he wants to do is Democratic, though this is clearly at odds with the American tradition of limited democracy the left meant to invoke when warning about what Trump threatens.
Awesome, thanks so much for sharing, Andrew. That's exactly why I wanted to put this up; to see if others have written about this. (Actually a lot of my writing is less about me having firm ideas and more about ongoing learning about things that are interesting to me; just to say I hugely appreciate it.)
Happy to share! To clarify, my linked post is on a similar topic but not the exact same as the one you mention here. And it's aimed more at the left, I'd say, than the (laudable) appeals to all sides you attempt.
Yes. Yes this makes sense! Please keep making sense.
Thanks, Helen, for that; it means a lot!
https://open.substack.com/pub/hmeltonfox/p/the-anatomy-of-a-con-trumps-tariffs?r=4cg543&utm_medium=ios
I have been thinking lots about positions v. objectives, which is something that came up for me while learning about negotiation specifically and dispute resolution (law school energy) more generally. In the negotiation context the ‘position’ often is posited as obscuring the ‘objective.’ I think unpacking this angle of it will do more than your definitional exercise, orrrrrr, the definitional exercise will be more purposeful with this additional perspective:
So we’ll call a ‘position’ what you /say/ you want, what you’ve been trained to say. It’s what you walk to the negotiation table with and say, I’ll give you X if you give me Y. The contents of X and Y are your position. Your objective is often a little less concrete, and might be framed as what you ‘really’ want or really find acceptable, which might not be apparent or may be deliberately obscured when opening a negotiation. The objective might be a little more like ‘be happy’ ‘get my client what they told me to get’ ‘make it to the end of the work day’ ‘enable specific division of my company to act on developing a product that makes me and my shareholders money’ and so forth.
The negotiation exercise I did where this was illustrated most clearly was like, mock negotiations, basically bids, between two pharma companies competing for the supply chain of an exotic plant. Your position for A Corp. was ‘get the plant’ and the stated/presumed presumption of the person representing B Corp. was ‘get the plant.’ Knee jerk competitive negotiation over the position basically results in impossible bids and huge expenses and no party can really leave the exchange profitably. But diligent and open negotiations with lots of information reveals, AHA! Corp. A’s product only uses the stem, and Corp. B’s product only uses the flower. Both corps had more specific objectives than they let on in their positions (for reasonable fears regarding trade secrets blah blah); yet once they were able to work honestly from their objectives a deal was possible even when the positions dictated there would be no middle ground.
I find some of these misused political and ideological terms (democracy marxism communism DEI CRT fascism capitalism & al.) are people’s first attempts at stating positions. They largely learned their positions from their trusted news sources and policy wonks, no one really has time to interrogate the ideas, it can be questionable how much any of this impacts day to day life, so people come into discussions with ‘positions’ that are highly invested in ideological distinctions that they dooooooon’t quite grasp. Or ideological positions that openly invite confusion and conflict regarding their premises.
Then proceeds the sparring. I want democracy which is not what you want because I perceive your actions to represent fascism. You say you want democracy but I don’t trust you because the consequences of the policies your ideologues champion… harm aspects of the social order that I think are vital to democracy. And so on.
But when people get moved away from the vague and nebulous position of supporting democracy (which as you are insightfully pointing out represents a network of ideas and viewpoints that aren’t perfectly consonant), to a real objective which typically looks like ‘change policy that I perceive to be hurting me’, okay, then we can have a real discussion about the pros and cons of that policy. Who is bearing the costs and is that just and can we shift those costs more consciously and fairly. Or is there a misunderstanding about the policy and the data surrounding it that can be explained or contextualized. And the power of this shift is DOUBLE TRUE if the policy can be addressed on its own, rather than as some manifestation of a party line where the ideological commitment tries to lock the relationship between position and objective.
And approaching it this way saves us from having to DEFINE democracy - instead we can use rubrics like you laid out, oh, hmm, from this person and this perspective, their democratic commitment likely means they are engaging the policy from /this/ perspective, rather than /that/ perspective which may be true of my friends’ views of democracy but may not be that widely held of a view. Knowing others’ definitions of democracy (without committing ourselves to saying democracy can or cannot be what they define it as) helps get the discussion from position to objective while raising fewer hackles. And skirting the definitional issue, and/or permitting expansive definitions… it also saves us from things like believing democracy demands a stance on the electoral college, when in fact the arguments for and against the electoral college can each be quite democratic and the decision for or against can be made using democratic/(mass voting participation under a constitutional rubric) techniques.
I wrote a little about this the days after the election.
https://open.substack.com/pub/exasperatedalien/p/what-does-it-mean-to-believe-in-democracy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ksl93
A lot of people talk past each other because they use the word democracy when they actually mean liberalism, or fealty to the constitution or rule of law - both of which can just as easily be seen as *limits* on democracy. Some conservatives will say that since Trump was elected, anything he wants to do is Democratic, though this is clearly at odds with the American tradition of limited democracy the left meant to invoke when warning about what Trump threatens.
Awesome, thanks so much for sharing, Andrew. That's exactly why I wanted to put this up; to see if others have written about this. (Actually a lot of my writing is less about me having firm ideas and more about ongoing learning about things that are interesting to me; just to say I hugely appreciate it.)
Happy to share! To clarify, my linked post is on a similar topic but not the exact same as the one you mention here. And it's aimed more at the left, I'd say, than the (laudable) appeals to all sides you attempt.