Virtue Ethics by Way of Cringecore Strat Comm

I saw myself as a leader when I entered journalism school, writing about environmental issues for the student newspaper. Eventually, I shifted my focus from science journalism to strategic communication; I wanted a stronger understanding of how to communicate my ideas to the widest possible audience, so that I could one day do the most good for myself and others. I needed to know more about the world (especially the emotional mechanics of “neoliberal” society) in order to understand it — to communicate its effects, explore practical alternatives, and imagine what could come next. I was willing to compartmentalize any hangups I had about the ethics of rhetoric or advertising, because I was confident my broader path was a virtuous one.

Eventually, after pursuing grad studies in the field and working for two years in advertising, I arrived at two deeper truths:

  • Individuals shouldn’t try to focus on the widest audience possible (instead focus on your 10,000 “true fans”, at least according to Kevin Kelley)
  • Often the most effective way to communicate something is to simply be honest, which liberates oneself from worrying about how people are going to receive your message in the first place (because your message is ultimately one of education).

This latter truth led me to the insight that through teaching, we can find the holy grail of strategic communication. To my mind, there is simply no better way to communicate something than to teach with honesty, passion and integrity. I think its worth consdiering whether communicating a message you don’t actually believe, over time, in is itself a form of dishonesty. Perhaps long durations of such unwitting dishonesty may be toxic to our character development — we end up deluding ourselves into believing things we don’t actually believe in order to preserve what we feel to be our truer psyches. A defensive mechanism of sorts.

This is surely part of what leads well-intentioned people to unwittingly perform dishonest acts — they do not know their own inner truths, either because they have silenced them for so long, or because our culture and society does necessarily not reward such things. Thus in abiding by the expectations of culture and society, we may end up partaking in a vast conspiracy against our own happiness, because we silence ourselves from communicating how we really feel, what we truly believe. Over time, such an environment seems likely to unconsciously dissemble deeper aspects of personality — compartmentalizing our conscious in favor of more immediate satisfactions, like the desire to be accepted by others.

Maybe by simply taking an approach to communication grounded in educational principles (the only objective being to educate others about our thoughts and emotions) we may be able to generate a more mindful, flourishing and productive relationship between our selves and our society.

During COVID lockdown I’ve found it helpful to reorient myself in the vision of an educator — someone whose mission is not to communicate something in a “strategic” manner, but to simply to teach complex ideas, such as virtue ethics with honesty and compassion. If it can be achieved through writing, the teacher I see myself as is also a writer — one who places himself in positions where he can help people discover their own truths, if only so that we can better communicate as a society.

The dilemma I realized during the COVID lockdown was something like this: What if you believe that people need to believe in things, but you also believe that there are some fixed normative that underlie the structures of all beliefs? Some elusive metaphysical version of the Good worth incorporating into one’s teaching agenda? What if you have a strong system of personally-derived virtue ethics but also a metaphysical culture from which those virtue ethics are derived? Then, if you’re a strategic communication professional who believes in honest communication, and you discover a way of communicating theoretical concepts that seem to more helpfully explain the real world, shouldn’t your professional obligation be to uphold and consciously manifest these ideals?

I didn’t have the word for it for a long time, but this is what I had been pursuing all along — the praxis-based cultivation of arete, or virtuousness, the process of living up to one’s fullest potential. The best way to do this, at least for this communications professional, is probably the cringecore written word.