The Power of the Positive Word

Two towns, eight miles apart, put nearly identical questions to their voters in November 2004. One passed. One failed. Comb the record all day for a second explanation and you will not find one. The only difference anyone can locate is the wording. That is the whole argument of this episode, and it is worth sitting with, because the same principle that decided a Bergen County land-preservation vote also helped carry a nation to the moon.

The proposition is simple enough to stand on its own, aphoristically, without explanation or defense: the power of the positive word is positive results.

Two nearly identical towns, one very different result

Picture two affluent municipalities in northern New Jersey, comparable in almost every way that matters. Comparable homes. Comparable schools. Comparable downtowns, open space and property-tax rates. In the same election, both asked their voters about protecting open space.

The first question asked whether the township should create a municipal trust fund for land preservation, based on a tax of one percent per one hundred dollars of assessed value. Read those words again: create, trust, fund, preservation. It passed, 52 to 48.

The second question asked whether the village should impose an additional tax levy of up to one percent per one hundred dollars for its municipal trust fund. Read those words: impose, additional, tax levy. It failed, by the exact same 52 to 48.

Same money. Same mechanism. Same margin, only mirrored. The difference was diction.

The story has a coda. Four years later the winning township ran the idea again, this time loaded with even more positive language, acquisition, development, maintenance, preservation, and carried it 62 to 38. The village that failed never got back on the ballot. The winner was Teaneck, where Eli lives. The town that failed was Ridgewood.

None of this is an accusation of manipulation. It is an observation about how human beings hear. When you ask people whether to create something for preservation, you invite them forward. When you ask them to accept an imposed, additional tax levy, you back them into a corner. The idea did not change. The frame did.

From a township to the moon

Now take the same principle and scale it up until it is unrecognizable in size but identical in kind.

On May 25, 1961, four months after the “ask not” inaugural and four days shy of his forty-fourth birthday, John F. Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress. The nation was still smarting from four years of Soviet firsts in space. Look at the words he chose for that famous commitment: believe, commit, achieving, goal, before, landing, returning, safely. Twenty-seven percent of the words in that single sentence carry a positive valence even out of context.

They were so well crafted that when Kennedy warned, in the very next sentence, that no single space project in this period would be so difficult or so expensive, it did not matter. The difficulty had already been reframed as a requisite challenge, the price of a goal already accepted. He led with the reaching, not the cost.

It is worth speculating what would have happened had he reversed the order and led with the difficult, expensive part. Eight years and two months later, and nearly six years after Kennedy’s assassination, Neil Armstrong took that one small step. Great leaders know this instinctively, and still work at it every day. As Eli puts it, in a line earned over fifteen years teaching Executive Communication and Leadership at Fairleigh Dickinson University:

“Not all great communicators can lead, but all great leaders can communicate.”

Which is another way of saying that all great leaders are communicators first.

Stepping forward, or falling backward

Underneath the ballot arithmetic and the presidential rhetoric is a deeper question about which direction people choose to face. Abraham Maslow framed it as cleanly as anyone ever has:

“You will either step forward into growth or fall backward into safety.”

Eli’s comment is terse and pointed. Falling backward is precisely what has happened over the last ten to twenty years, and it is why so little progress is being made in schools, education systems and social services. Those who resist the teaching of challenging books, who want parents rather than professionals running boards of education, who are afraid to move forward: that is the backward step, dressed as caution. Throughout history we have stepped forward into growth and backward into safety, and deciding to do something about it is, in a sense, what this podcast is.

Maslow also pledged his faith in the species. Human beings, he said, have wonderful possibilities and inscrutable depths. There is nothing we cannot accomplish. We just have to do it. That confidence sits well next to another of Eli’s aphorisms: “The most important thing you can do with your life is something that will outlast you.” A moon landing qualifies. So, in its quiet way, does a preserved acre of open space.

What If

D-Day, June 6, 1944. Eisenhower launched Operation Overlord across Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, and as bloody as it was it succeeded, though it should not have, because Erwin Rommel, perhaps the most accomplished general in the world at the time, had everything he needed to defeat it. What he did not have was authority. Thirty kilometers away sat a battalion of panzers with air support and ammunition trains, and Rommel could not release them; he had to ask von Rundstedt, who was in Paris buying birthday shoes for his wife, and who in any case could not go over Hitler’s head because Hitler was asleep under standing orders not to be woken before noon. By noon the invasion was six hours old. Hitler signed the release at eleven that night. Meanwhile FDR, Churchill, George Marshall and the King of England had given Eisenhower their complete confidence and full command of the battle, and his objectives, fifty yards inland to the first crossroads, to a barn, were met. What if the authority had run the other way? It very easily could have.

Why this is critical thinking, not spin

The lesson here is not that words are tricks. It is that words are choices, and choices reveal whether you are inviting people forward or backing them into safety. A ballot drafter, a president and a board of education all face the same fork. The full episode carries three of Eli’s aphorisms, Maslow’s challenge, and the D-Day What If. For the complete walk through both ballot questions, word by word, and the JFK sentence in full, listen to the Vantage Point episode.

Listen

• 🎧 Episode page: https://eliamdur.com/positive-word/
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• ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VantagePoint-Podcast
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If this made you think, follow or subscribe wherever you listen, and share it with someone who chooses their words with care.

Vantage Point – the podcast for critical thinkers. We’re not political, just critical.

This episode is supported by Vantage Point’s Executive Sponsor, Stephen Bozer, SVP of Human Health at Flavine. Also supported by Major Sponsors Bergen Volunteers, neighbors serving neighbors across 70 towns in Bergen County since 1966, and Kardam Consulting, strategic counsel for the business of making medicine.