I just finished a remarkable book by Paul Rusesabagina, the man on whose life the movie Hotel Rwanda is based. In his autobiography An Ordinary Man he tells about growing up the son of a wise and respected banana farmer, almost becoming a preacher, and then finding his true calling as a hotel manager. If you’ve seen the movie you know how he stood between the mass insanity of genocide and a hotel full of refugees, fighting for their lives with his tongue.
Mr. Rusesabagina has an incredible understanding of people and a gift for touching their inner motivations with his words. I’d like to share a couple of examples from his book.
I saw Hotel Rwanda with my wife last year. The director mercifully limits the depiction of genocide, and the character of Paul Rusesabagina comes through clearly in Don Cheadle’s performance. I got to see Mr. Rusesabagina in person this past March, when he spoke at the National Association of Independent Schools 2007 conference in Denver. The auditorium sat in packed silence as he told his story. One thing he said struck me with particular force: “Words are the best and the worst weapons ever. I believe in the power of words.”
He expands on this idea in his book, saying:
“Words are the most effective weapons of death in man’s arsenal. But they can also be powerful tools of life. They may be the only ones.”
“Today I am convinced that the only thing that saved those 1,268 people in my hotel was words. Not the liquor, not money, not the U.N. Just ordinary words directed against the darkness.” (Introduction to An Ordinary Man, page xv)
You see, Rwanda’s leaders had been using words for years to drive a wedge between the Hutus and the Tutsis, dehumanizing and demonizing the Tutsis in all sorts of propaganda but especially through the popular RTLM radio.
Listen to Paul Rusesabagina again:
Another principle helped me in these conversations, and it is this: Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense.
When we shop for a car we make sure to investigate the gas mileage, look at the leg room, peer at the engine, and evaluate the cost, but the decision to buy it always comes down to a feeling in the gut. How will I look behind the wheel? Will it be fun to drive? What will my friends think? We congratulate ourselves later for a shrewd acquisition based on reasons a, b, and c, but the actual decision cannot be put in terms of an equation. People are really never as reasonable as they seem to be – in fact, “reason” is usually an afterthought, nothing more than a cover story for the feelings inside.
The same is true in politics. Let me give you a rather pertinent example. I seriously doubt the leadership of Rwanda really believed that average Tutsis were spies who had melted into the general population. I think they whipped up the flames of fear to create that belief. They were appealing to a dark place in the heart – that unreconstructed part of us that comes down from our ancestors, who lived in constant fear of beasts in the night. There was an emotional reason for people to hate and fear the Tutsi, and that nonsense about traitors in the villages was a set of “facts” grafted into place to justify the violence. And as I have said, the ethnic violence was only a tool for a set of cynical men to hold on to their power – which is perhaps man’s ultimate emotional craving.
It is a dismal principle. But I could use it to save lives.
When I took that colonel into my office, poured him some beer, and puffed up his ego it was not about the facts of the matter at all. It was about his insecurity in his position and his need to feel like an important person. I created a web of words in which the choice I did not want him to make – killing Thomas – was running counter to his emotional needs. I made him believe that such a loutish task was beneath him. And he bought it, even though he probably had the power to snap his fingers and have me and other troublemakers chopped to bits within twenty minutes. It is not that the colonel was a stupid man. Even the best of us can be slaves to our self-regard. (An Ordinary Man, page 121-123)
This is a dramatic example of the principle that our emotional, intuitive Right Brain has much more to do with how we make decisions than we would like to believe. We want to think that we make decisions based on rational Left Brain reasoning. But the principle “Win the heart, and the mind will follow” has never been more true.
The amazing thing to me about Paul Rusesabagina’s story is that he was able to see through the tough exterior of even evil men, find the soft part, and use his words to move their hearts. Not always make them good, mind you. Just deter them from evil.
That’s real communication.
Read for Yourself
I listened to the audio book version of An Ordinary Man, which I highly recommend.