To say Yes is to say No to No

in #life8 years ago

On learning how you say Yes or No will help you act more freely.

The grammar presents both adverbs "yes" and "no" as two options located on the same scope.
“So, is it yes or no?"
We become convinced of the binary nature of the decision, whereas the No is first and the Yes only takes meaning by opposition to No.

The little child say "No" long before saying "Yes". His first self-positioning in the world is to oppose, forcing us by this act to recognize it. A Yes would not have that effect.


Often, when we want to help a little child, this one begins with a refusal of our help. He will use or accept our help only after having "stopped to refuse"

When we want to get someone's agreement, as we expect to be turned down, we sometimes resort to a simple technique: “You’ll probably say no." And then the other to indulge in contradicting us, sometimes abundantly! He was taken to say no to no.

To accept the proposition A, we better start to introducing non-A thesis and making it ridiculous or unacceptable. The interlocutor is then led to say no to non-A thesis and thereby to accept the thesis A faster.

It's the same when someone comes to us to request an authorization or agreement: our first reaction is often the defense and therefore the refusal. That’s only in a second step that we give our consent. We come back from our original No.

Knowing this process, when you face decisions to take, agreements to give, if you are well connected to your feeling and have a better understanding on what are the real issues for you, you will find yourself more confident to say a true No ... or a true Yes.

Isn’t freedom the ability to act according to our most genuine desires?

Freedom start through a first No, but taking support on this refusal, it only accomplishes by exceeding this no into a Yes.

Thanks for reading.


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sometime dear . we like to say yes .. so yes has important in our life

I think the concept of loss aversion explains our initial stance of "no" over yes. I also found this interesting:

To accept the proposition A, we better start to introducing non-A thesis and making it ridiculous or unacceptable.

That's really close to what could be considered a straw man argument. It isn't exactly, but it can be really close. Example: if we make non-A out to be ridiculous and it is not, then we have committed a straw man fallacy. I wish every human on the planet had to memorize logical fallacies. This is a good place to start: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

@lukestoke: Thanks for your comment.

I think the concept of loss aversion explains our initial stance of "no" over yes

I won't agree with this. Even when they have nothing to loose (or win), people tend to say no or think no at first.

Listen around you ... so many people start their sentence or comment with "no, ... " even if the whole sentence after doesn't contains any negation, even sometimes when it is to approve what has been said previously. The funniest IMO is "no, it's ok".

The concept of straw-man fallacy (you misrepresented someone's argument to make it easier to attack) is also interesting but more focused on the content of the arguments and the opposition between both parts.

I linked to wikipedia to hopefully better explain what I mean by loss aversion. To me, it's the psychological underpinning for why people start with no and think no at first.

Humans may be hardwired to be loss averse due to asymmetric evolutionary pressure on gains and losses. For an organism operating close to the edge, the loss of a day's food could amount to death, while the gain of an extra days food could lead to increased comfort but (unless it could be costlessly stored) would not lead to a corresponding increase in life expectancy.

Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains

Basically, we want to maintain the status quo which involves saying "no" to just about every possible thing because most things represent a change in the current state of nature, even if it's just a new piece of information.

Anyway, that's my view on it. Thanks for letting me share my opinion.