Albert O. Hirschman
The three sentences that turn you down
Perversity, futility, jeopardy
The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Harvard University Press, 1991)
Your plan was refused and all you heard was a no. That no arrives in only three shapes.
What actually happened?
Writing The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman was looking at one thing. For two hundred years, every time somebody proposed widening something — personal rights in the eighteenth century, the vote in the nineteenth, social provision in the twentieth — the objectors changed, the countries changed, the subject changed, and the arguments did not. So he stopped arguing with the content and started counting the shapes: the case against a change comes back as perversity, futility or jeopardy, and almost never as anything else.
Perversity
The first shape: the very thing you want to improve is what your remedy will damage. Its force sits in that word very — not a side effect, an outright reversal. It sounds profound because it claims to understand causation better than you do.
Adding a review step will only make people less willing to propose things. Possibly true, possibly just clever-sounding.
Futility
The second shape: change it or leave it, the result is the same, because whatever drives this sits deeper. It contradicts the first — one says your remedy has drastic consequences, the other that it has none — and the same person often uses both.
A new process will not help, the people are the same people. Notice it never says what would help.
Jeopardy
The third shape: what you want may well be good, but the cost is something we already hold. This one is hardest to answer because it is often true. The word endanger, though, is usually stretched, and arrives without a quantity anyone can check.
This will hurt our existing customers. How many, which ones, and how long before it is earned back, goes unsaid.
He turned on his own side too
Near the end he sets out the reforming side's three mechanical sentences: the danger is imminent, do this and the rest improves alongside it, history is with us. He was not handing anyone a weapon. He wanted both sides using fewer ready-made lines.
It will be too late if we wait, and it will only make things worse, are one laziness pointing two ways.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: the plan was refused, you heard one no, and you know neither what to change nor whether to raise it again.
Ask first: which of the three shapes was that? Will the person saying it give a number anyone can check?
Where it goes wrong: used to label whoever disagrees. Naming the shape is for pulling the talk back to specifics, not for refusing to listen.
Lines to keep
The case against a change comes back in only three shapes.
Perversity and futility contradict each other. One mouth says both.
Ask how much, and two of the three shapes stop.
Same situation, other people are asking
Do I push, or do I take the no?They turned my proposal down. Do I bring it back, and with what?Their reason changes every time and the answer never does.The no came back. I can't tell what shape it was.They said no to my plan · all 5 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.