The world is not broken
We are participating in a union greater than the European project and no referendum can change that .
If you voted REMAIN it may be tempting to demonise those who voted to sever Britain’s European connectedness but, we are all to blame for division. As the dust settles it’s clear we have been talking amongst ourselves while we ought to have been talking to one-another. We relied on our government, our media and our social networks to connect to those with other beliefs about our British identity than our own. But that responsibility ultimately lies with us individually.
It is false and it is counter-productive to say that the world is broken. And I believe it is a mistake to say the results of the referendum were wrong, as the over two million signatures on the petition to call for a new referendum are doing. That strikes me as a desperate quick-fix leading us to further division, when we actually have an opportunity to explore what true unity looks and feels like.
If we want to solve the challenges we now face, I believe our most powerful starting point is to investigate and address our emotional relationship with these challenges. Remain or Leave, we are all human. And in a number of ways Britain was served the logical result.
In this article I will discuss why it was logical, and how we might start to move forward from this point together as one.
Although generalisation let’s consider three facets of a mindset at play in the campaign I find helpful to consider.
- Loss Aversion
Loss Aversion is the behavioural theory demonstrating that humans sense the emotion of loss more acutely than they sense the emotion of gain.
If I give my son three sweets this will make him a rather happy chappy. But if his sister steals those three sweets he’ll blow up into a 7.2 on the richter scale of pissed-offedness.
‘Make Britain Great Again’, and ‘Let’s take control back’ are evocative in ways that, ‘Britain stronger in Europe’ is not. Evidence shows that we will work a third more intensely to avoid loss than we will to earn a windfall (let alone retain the status quo). And we see rhetoric surrounding Brexit taking advantage of this.
2. Information Choke-hold
There is a choke-hold on information that we read in the news that purports to reflect real life, but is actually intentionally designed to trigger loss aversion.
We read that the world is broken but the world it reports on is not real life. Headlines tell us of the exceptional and the rare, not the general and normal. Geo-political issues are skewered to enhance a sense of fear at loss i.e. worst possible scenarios, panic, trepidation toward change.
3. Fear of Strangers
The skewering of factual information caused by loss aversion and enhanced by the media creates a culture that discourages people from talking to strangers, or even acting in a way that might appear strange to others.
We fear exploring our personal beliefs and opening our minds and our hearts to the grey areas that make us complicated, emotional beings. The reticence to address these emotions inevitably causes us to feel broken inside and to see other belief systems as wrong.
The takeaway from these three aspects of this mindset is that all three of these extremely powerful tendencies are not the truth. They should not be dictating the decisions we make in our lives.
It is an error to rely on the media or any organisation to inspire curiosity in your own humanity, the humanity of others and reverence for the mysteries of life.
To lead this article I chose a cover picture I took of my father talking to my brother under a starry sky on a road trip near Madrid for his 90th birthday. My father was a Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Austria when he was 16 years old. He has witnessed horrific displays of human behaviour, and yet here he is, on a hill in the middle of nowhere, on some hair-brained road-trip, having a laugh.
In ways words fail to describe, the photograph reminds me that the universe is behaving as it should be, always has, always will and by extension so are all of us; the little integral parts of that grand wondrous mechanism. Good things may come out of the divisions we have seen, unity is the next cycle. The geo-political vacuum we are now in makes plain that no-one is driving this ship, and yet we are all in the boat together.
Now is a time to be brave and behave extraordinarily. Step out of your comfort zone and go talk to the strangers in our world.
