Moving the Needle

Life is at its essence the ongoing struggle to move the needle. Something inside us or in the hostile external world or in the corrupt political environment must be not only be shaken but mightily pushed into a direction that promises hope, progress, and overall improvement of some sickly condition. 

History is a compendium of people who moved the needle. 

In the spiritual world, Jesus moved the emphasis from outward piety to focusing on the secrets of the heart. 

Paul moved the emphasis from religious tribalism to religious universalism. 

People without scruples appropriated Jesus and Paul’s teachings for their own political ends. They in effect moved the needle to amass power. 

In the modern world, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg changed the way we use gadgets, which in turned radically altered not only the way we communicate with others but with the metrics for gauging our self-worth and social approval. 

Inventors of transportation move the needle. 

Inventors of vaccines move the needle.

So do misinformation trolls, online mountebanks, and populist political hacks.

Roger Aisles turned a news network into an alt-right propaganda machine so that crackpot conspiracies became mainstreamed into the minds of millions, and this moved the needle in American politics. 

When we talk about moving the needle, especially in the realm of politics, there is debate about the Pendulum Effect or the Irreversible Change Effect. Does a reality star mountebank who stirs nativist prejudice represent the pendulum shift reacting to liberal democracy or does this impostor represent permanent damage to a democratic institution? 

Whether these types of authoritarian impulses are pendulum shifts or represent some kind of recalcitrant evil, these impulses are met with fierce resistance. A lot of news and political commentary at present is about how this fierce resistance appears to fail in its objective to move the needle. Life is an endurance test: How long does one resist before shriveling in the face of apathy? What glimmers of hope might fuel the fight for change? How much hope is needed? 

People who stave off apathy and hopelessness by providing persuasive evidence that resistance is working are moving the needle. 

Wisdom is knowing the difference between effective efforts to move the needle and self-destructive ones. The definition of a self-destructive attempt to move the needle is anything that is a diversion from the real task of moving the needle and believing that this diversion is a desirable path toward real change and happiness. As a case in point, we can accumulate “friends,” “likes” and the endorphin-buzz of hundreds of comments for our Instagram and Facebook posts but remain the emotional dumpster fire we were before we went online. We failed therefore to move the needle. 

Based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the movie Citizen Kane is about a rich man who tried to move the needle inside his broken heart by accumulating things, including safari animals. He failed to move the needle. He died in despair. Today zebra herds run through Pismo Beach. 

When we talk about moving the needle, we can refer to any earth-shaking experience that permanently changes our behavior. We may switch from instant to fresh-roast coffee. We may become vegetarians. We may quit eating sugar and gluten. Or we may change our name and identity and become someone who is unrecognizable to ourselves and the world. 

Moving the needle refers to significant change in our values, priorities, and desires, and our behavior reflects that change. When a racist demagogue troll was elected president, I found I could no longer enjoy my lifetime passion of watching sports. 

My reaction to a troll being elected to the highest level of office was visceral alarm and disgust. I listened to people smarter than I am articulate what happened and what likely outcomes we could expect. 

I waited for others to see the horror that many of us saw, but for two years I waited in vain. 

Moving the needle therefore is about persuading people who are diametrically opposed to what we value. Most people, even the brightest of us cannot do this. Most smart people can find an audience of the like-minded, the Kool-Aid drinkers who already exist in our chosen bubble sealed with our cognitive biases and virtue signaling. 

But it is the rare person who punctures the bubble of the opposition and makes a persuasive case that the people in that opposing bubble are intellectually and morally wrong in a deep fundamental way that makes them so uncomfortable they feel compelled to get out of their bubble and start their lives over from scratch. 

Self-interest bordering on the pathological condition of narcissism seems to be the main reason it so impossible to persuade people. A salient example is the aftermath of the Civil War. The Southern whites had to give up slavery, which by all accounts was a moral abomination, but those whites were not focused on the depth of their sins. Rather, they were focused on their wounded self-esteem, which compelled them to rewrite the historical narrative so that the Civil War was about state rights and Northern aggression. The cruelty of slavery was replaced with the Lost Cause narrative, which says whites were engaged in a noble quest to rule over other races, but their quest was crushed by a corrupt world. 

This narrative informed by narcissism allows champions of Jim Crow and segregation to be erected into venerated statues. Public schools and street signs are named after these same figures. Championing racism, the Confederate flag is brandished atop people’s homes. There is no shame in the history of slavery, only pride and unrepentance. Rather than see slavery for the evil that it is, the narrative is about “family honor,” which is code for narcissism.

We see this same narcissism in the election of a racist troll to the presidency. This racist troll locks up children in cages where the children, separated from their parents, are mired in filth. The troll and his followers feel no shame for this human rights violation. To the contrary, they are proud that their policy “makes America great again.” 

In the face of such evil and human degradation, we can see that narcissism is an effective repellent to moving the needle. 

Narcissism of course isn’t only a repellent in moving the needle in the realm of politics and civil rights. Narcissism repels personal change. So many of our attempts at self-improvement are not really self-improvement at all, but manifestations of narcissism. Fame, a book deal, a high profile on TV, being deemed important, feeling relevant--all these desires stem from a broken insecure self. Ironically enough, when we stop trying to move the needle in the realms for wealth and fame is when we’ve actually moved the needle.