Sociopathy and myopia
Objectivity is a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him (sic). Invoking objectivity is abrogating responsibility — hence its popularity. Heinz von Foerster
I have been taxed recently by the sheer weight and volume of simple, linear explanations that are no such thing – not explanations at all — and I have been vexed by the popularity of the nonsense. The popularity distorts the democratic process — if enough people believe passionately in something that cannot possibly be true, it enters some twilight zone where it has to be dealt with. For instance, if enough people think the death penalty will reduce crime, it becomes a political factor that will tempt politicians to pander to it.
None of this is say that I know better. I am with von Foerster here: I am paying attention to the connection between the style of the claims made and the lack of responsibility taken for the outcomes. The sheer lack of self-awareness gives the game away: claims are constantly made about “facts” independent of the person observing them. It ceases to matter whether anything is verifiable or not: we have claims being made in the political process without any responsibility by the claimer or any accountability for the effects. The classic claims are statements which foster racial division and hate — note how the speakers always claim they are only reporting — even the most objective of facts are interpreted through the lens of the listener.
The hunger for, and popularity of, such claims is a mirroring process. People want to believe these claims because they absolve the listener/reader of responsibility that are otherwise morally problematic. White supremacists are desperate, at some subconscious level, for stories showing that people of colour are less than they are: less moral, less intelligent, less deserving.[1] My colleague John Smith says that you read the Daily Mail because you know you will never have to think again. Your prejudices with be justified every day.
The argument about whether such pronouncements are “true” or not is entirely misleading. It is misleading because it is designed to deflect from the need to take responsibility for speaking and listening. Our social selves are highly tuned to what it is acceptable to say. But that notion of acceptability is what allows hysterias and institutional racism and disgusting corruption.
Positive social awareness
I take it as a given that to swim in this murky sea you need to keep your head above water. You need to be able to work with hypotheses about why stupid explanations are given when they are inadequate. You need to be able to see why people might lap up those explanations. You need to have alternative stories that don’t have the toxic outcomes. And that is hard because you are up against professional exponents of the dark arts. I would be happier if the professional explainers could only get sceptical platforms, because of who they are. Instead we still seem to think their self-appointed expertise gives them some special insight and value.[2]
The problem is to learn. How can you learn to discern the meaning behind all the noise? No-one ever evaluates the outcomes. Remember how organisational management falls back on reorganisation to cover the tracks of their disastrous interventions? There will always be a new scandal, a new preposterous statement, a new Quixotic sallying forth. Their over-riding purpose is precisely to make sure that the outcomes of the previous idiocies cannot be properly understood.
If you know your Stafford Beer, he starts his famous CBC lectures called Designing Freedom with the notion of relaxation time. When you disturb a complex system, because of the myriad interaction between parts of the system it can take a long time before the system settles down to something approximating a steady state. If you try to evaluate how the system is working before it settles down, you will see it pinging around in a way that is not terribly informative. The tactic of making sure it never settles really does avoid accountability.
The complexity of any worthwhile, non-toxic explanations is also time-critical. The rippling damage caused by simplistic rubbish explanation will spread until we manage to distance ourselves from them. If you can persuade people to smoke cigarettes, you can easily convince them that black is white and that their true interests are the opposite what they actually are.
I just watched a clip of Dennis Skinner educating a journalist who was trying to interview him at the party conference. The journalist was doubled up with nervous laughter, knowing as he did that no-one takes Skinner seriously. Skinner told him he was increasingly like Trump, as he (the journalist) did not believe he was part of the society that he was writing for. A serious argument laughed aside because of a set of linear, stupid explanations that supposedly show that socialism doesn’t work. Where to go from there?
I could write similarly about interviews with the leader of the Extinction Rebellion. If someone tells you in all earnestness that you have not understood the fate awaiting you, then relying on some sort of entitled, BBC-style smugness is exactly the wrong response. It proves the point that people in power and in the establishment are not prepared to be serious. People who are systematically not serious believe they are in a privileged, protected position that is more important to them than any angst in the world. Wrong but terribly, destructively persistent.
Democracy for grown-ups
We laugh now at times in history when only landowners were thought to be responsible enough to have a vote, or only men.[3] But there is an underlying serious issue. If great masses of votes can be swayed by arguments and explanations that are totally, frivolously false, then popular votes can be won by lies and worse. The first time this was a serious problem with catastrophic outcomes was the use by the Nazis of propaganda broadcast to the nation via a new communications medium, the wireless. Now we have the criminal misuse of social media with similar effect.
There is a great book entitled Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus. The last two are two of my favourite authors and Fernando Flores was briefly a very young economics minister under Allende in Chile before the coup. The notion of course is that democracy dies when citizens no longer take action on their own behalf, but there is a substantial discussion of how experts who know they are one of the people, who are true citizens, have a special role to play. Because of course they can tell the practical difference between over-simple arguments and explanations that can lead out of the morass. The day of thinking that politicians have expertise is long gone.
Almost as a metaphor here, Matt Hancock has been promoting a piece of medical AI called Babylon.[4] Babylon has been shown over and over again to give nonsense diagnoses and advice to patients. This morning on Twitter someone was able to show that a woman suffering from a classic heart attack is diagnosed with hysteria. There are plenty of GPs that give bad advice to patients but to claim Babylon as progress takes a special sort of stupidity. And corruption, because of course “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
In a democracy worthy of the name, it is the understanding of the changing nature of the world that needs to negotiated. To suppress ideas and information, an occurrence shown in the story about Skinner above, is too easy, but everyone is the poorer and democracy quickly gets sickly. Playground bullying politics will never result in adult democratic action. Having said which, abject circumstances like the present bring forth people of stature who can sometimes measure up to what is required. I am thinking of Jolyon Maugham.
Before we lose Hubert Dreyfus, he has a most helpful scale of expertise, on which knowledge comes only half-way up the scale. The ability to act surely and effectively in uncertain circumstances is the height of human prowess. Surefooted democratic building and action belong just there, but only if they are authentic.
Above all else context
There is a somewhat apocryphal story of showing a photograph of a person to a westerner and to a Japanese man. Their eye movements were recorded as they take in the image. The Japanese man spends 90% of his time scanning the background on the photo for clues about the situation. The westerner looks at the subject 90% on the time. It is no use pretending that this isn’t very real.
If you are trying to bully and suppress dissent, then you will not talk about context and complexity in the situation. You will be all foreground and TINA — There Is No Alternative. The world will laugh at you and you will not even be able to see why.[5]
If reality consists precisely of a dense web of interconnections, as described by Nora Bateson as symmathesy and the notion of warm data, there can be no simple explanations and there will always be an element of surprise in how things work out. There is no place for the simple platitudes of populists in the development of life and liveliness: or alternatively put: reinforcing prejudices leads only and always to death.
Any given event, fact, thought, or narrative has different meanings in different contexts. How could it be otherwise? When populists rehearse “facts” even when they are not simply lying, they are relying on the prejudices of their readers or listeners to supply a context and therefore a meaning in line with the original intention.[6] When a racial incident is reported, racists will use it to reinforce their prejudices: that is what it means to be a racist. Think, however, how difficult it would be to explore the incident in such a way that it undermined racist prejudices!
Very few people have the patience and the love of truth to painstakingly get to understand context. Myself included. Bullies and populists and psychopaths simply milk the inherent prejudice in a situation. People of good heart who feel their responsibilities to future generations are much more careful to extend the possibility at least of empathy and kindness.
Prejudice isn’t simply a matter of racism, sexism and intolerance of LBGT people. Prejudice is all the lazy middle ground between extremists on this side and on that.
Here’s a story from when I was first a consultant, 33 years ago. The small company I became a director of had a sort of business uncle, someone with some long experience and a wise head. What he said was that the sort of company that we were building wore its heart on its sleeve. He said that made us easy to exploit because people would very easily see how to appeal to our values and our better nature. What he was pointing to was our laziness in not understanding where our customers were coming from, and to their laziness in merely exploiting us rather than getting the best value from us.
Myopia
The laziness of thinking, or lack of thought altogether, leads to a systemic myopia. If it is true that Trump is permitting a genocide of the Kurds in exchange for building Trump towers in Turkey, you don’t get much more myopic. It is precisely the lack of imagination to see how things may play out, and lack of imagination about just how awful that might be, that allows senseless decisions to be made. The senselessness lies of course in that space between the wilful blindness and the reality of the interconnections.
In line with the advice of my then business uncle, the myopia and predictability of prejudice allow you to be controlled by more Machiavellian forces. Don’t ask me who is pulling Trump’s strings, or Boris Johnson’s for that matter, because it is more than my heart can bear. People with no conscience, no social feeling, no responsibility to the future — monsters who at the same time are too close to our own minds.
[1] Experiences, rather than facts, might have a chance of penetrating. Via reddit: “after a friend took him to visit a school for black children, [Ben Franklin] wrote that African ignorance was not inherently natural but come from lack of education, slavery and negative environments.“
http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/slavery-abolition-society/
[2] Whence the recent backlash against experts, perhaps.
[3] The astute reader will have noted the distinction. Women landowners were also allowed the vote, in some places, at some times. We’ve rehearsed before that women’s suffrage didn’t follow much later after men’s suffrage.
[4] Put the conflicts of interest to one side for a moment…
[5] Think of comedy. Few things are as hilarious as watching someone earnestly pursuing a goal that we know to be futile. Whether it’s Mr Bean, Mr Fawlty, The Office, or a dear friend, there is something seriously comic in a serious approach. (A link to last week’s post: perhaps that worldview is almost always Unitary?)
[6] Scott Adams talks about people watching different movies on the same screen. Despite the objective (!) elements being identical, the interpretations are wildly different, as though they’d been in different cinemas.
