The Brexit stultification effect
It has become a commonplace that we cannot have a working political process until people are able to say that Brexit was a stupid idea that has been shown to fail the UK catastrophically. The biggest factor in the necessary political debate needs to discussed, explicitly and openly. People do not have to agree of course, but the evidence needs to be on the table. The point is that it is not just Brexit and our relationship with the EU that cannot be discussed: the political process itself becomes impotent. I find this effect fascinating, and I wonder who is using the effect deliberately. 1
This is not the only sphere of debate where the impossibility of discussing what is really happening leads to an Alice in Wonderland debate that can lead nowhere good, and which for many people may be poisonous. In many discussions there is an elephant in the room that people ignore. The effect we are discussing here is where everyone knows that unless the elephant is discussed, all debate will generate nonsense. The effects of such taboos on speaking about what matters most generate some extreme social dysfunction. People whose self-image is tethered to being effective are going to exhibit weird and destructive behaviour.
Elites around the world are testing just how much they can get away with that is outside the rules, the constitutions, their mandates. And there is very little pushback. People challenging elite behaviour are held to account even when their behaviour is perfectly legal. Elites themselves believe they are increasingly immune from even scrutiny, let alone sanction.2
When Greta Thunberg says that it is self-evident that political leaders are not doing nearly enough to limit climate change, she is using our argument here in reverse. The evident fact that the political process is impotent can be used to argue that there is something that cannot be discussed that needs to be part of the debate. And that until it is, nothing will change. Perhaps growth itself must be questioned, for example.
Abortion was introduced into US politics almost accidentally as a way of capturing the votes of a certain demographic, a certain mindset of voters. Like Pandora’s box the issue got out of control to the extent that it now makes much necessary politics unavailable, inaccessible. Something about the nature of abortion as an issue, and even more so abortion arguments as they are deployed, makes politics impotent. It makes no difference at all to point out to “pro-life” voters how much death their views lead to.
Mediation
In the infamous school shooting at Uvalde, the police locked themselves away rather than face the shooter to rescue the children. Parents were understandably livid. In the recent midterm elections, 70% of residents of the county voted Republican, guaranteeing no change of policy. How can this happen? What would make a difference to people voting against the interests of their own children, against the lives of their own children?
There are examples, and have in the recent past been famous examples, of brave individuals mediating between factions which seem irreconcilable. People who can say to a dictator or a warlord: you need to see this differently. YOU need to see this differently. There are other perspectives that will allow you to meet your purposes better.
I am suggesting here that for the Brexit elephant or for the Ukraine destruction, it may be necessary for totally unacceptable things to be said in private but in an uncompromising way. There are things that need to be said, clearly and succinctly said. When the emperor has no clothes it should not be up to an innocent child to say what everybody knows. One of the obvious problems is that a politically secure emperor surrounded by sycophants has no way of hearing these messages.
We are talking about narratives that keep people conflicted and acting against their own interests without them being able to see that the narratives are the problem. The secret services, certainly in the US, are open about working intimately with social media companies to maintain these narrative frameworks. That used to be mainly about the US empire and colonialism and now it seems mainly about keeping an imploding GOP in business.
If you are a corrupt politician, you have to be able to buy votes somehow. The political power that flows from those votes is used to pay back the corrupt favours and bribes that were given to buy the votes. If the needs the corrupt politician services imply a narrative, that narrative must be maintained so that voters think the politician’s policies make sense. The whole edifice of legitimate and authoritative government can then reinforce the corruption.
But this process of corruption and its narrative support is precisely what leads to the creation of terrible and mad mistakes that cannot be dealt with by the political process. The entrenchment of perspective in the narrative is what makes alternative perspectives impossible. Brexit is only undiscussible and irreversible if you have tied your populist corruption to the notion that it was a political choice made by the British people. It was made undiscussable by buttressing it in totally illegitimate ways such as limiting its discussion on the BBC.
Dogma
A characteristic of people central to these non-debates, these debates that avoid reality, is that they are dogmatic. They hold views that they take to be be absolutely true in all circumstances.3 Abortion is wrong even in the case of a child raped by her father. Cutting taxes generates economic growth. Gun ownership is the root of freedom.
Of course, people who are dogmatic to this extent cannot debate the circumstances where their beliefs may not hold. And social media and rags like the Daily Mail are there to provide an echo chamber for dogma and make sure people feel supported in never having to think again. These are the people of course whose votes can be bought by corrupt politicians: they will do as they are told so long as a project is wrapped up the in the dogma they believe.
Dogma and racism are close allies. I remember a district council where the councillors would vote against any facilities for Travellers on their patch, even though the law requires them to make arrangements. Even after they had been on education course to help them understand their legal duties.
The exclusion in principle of evidence that might contradict a dogma and allow development of thought and understanding is the whole point of holding a dogmatic point of view. The denial of other points of view and the validity of people who might hold them has generated the nonsense about being cancelled, being woke: some things cannot be questioned, and that is where we started out. Good questions must be avoided at all cost and the cost of avoiding them can become infinite.
Trust
When I know someone well and find that they hold things to be true that I think are false, I can feel, literally and physically, the trust that it takes to work towards a meeting of minds. I have to trust such a person to be able to ask about their own assumptions and prejudices if I am to explore my own. I think this is not understood. People want to focus on winning an argument, as though the logic of the interaction is superior to the beliefs of the heart. The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: Pascal.
Who would expose themselves to sociopathic bullies by talking about what really matters to them? Well, people who feel they have little more to lose, so great is the harm being done. The Greta Thunbergs. The Just Stop Oil activists. Or in previous generations, the Suffragettes.
This is not trust in institution and procedure, in due process. It is the opposite, it is trusting in the humanity of someone you disagree with on something of huge importance.
Truth will out
These huge undiscussables prevent people from thinking and prevent social political processes from working, but there is another side to this. Dirty and inconvenient truths will surface and be seen, widely seen. Truths about things that cannot be spoken of! Truths that cannot find expression in oceans of relativism and whataboutism, will become apparent.
It feels to me that there is a disconnect between the explicitness of language and description and the implicitness of knowing when something, even an un-named something is true. The dynamics are opposite. The undiscussables have a huge impact and a huge sanction attached to them. You will certainly suffer if you challenge them. But this effect is leaky and over time becomes less effective. There comes a time when the existence of the sanctions and taboos comes to lend credence to the very things it tries to suppress and invalidate. Trump is an asset until he is a liability with very little time in between those understandings.
With issues like climate change there is something more like a war of attrition. The massive, truly enormous, funding of climate denial propaganda means that the truth-will-out dynamics need to happen again and again for different audiences in different places and times. The truth is more like a background given that will be argued against with pseudo research again and again while there is money to be made for oil companies.
On the big issues there are armies of people who have identified with something that is not true, and there is probably an undiscussable to disguise that fact. The dire history of imperialism and colonialism. The way agriculture destroys civilisations. Entrenched child abuse. The sheer wickedness of corporate greed. Food addictions. The words denied, denial, denialism get used until they are worn out describing people who will not look at what they are seeing. The impact is to fragment any possible social cohesion around an issue: the very cohesion that is necessary to get action moving when vested interests dig in their heels.
Staying sane
Kafka’s wonderful novels describe the impact of madness in the environment on his protagonists. R. D. Laing starts with observed and diagnosed madness and shows how it belongs in the environment. This is not a struggle between goodies and baddies, it is an epic journey to make sense of things that are designed not to make sense, to see through the smokescreens and the decoys and the misinformation.
We now have enough national governments around the world refusing to promote Covid vaccinations, for certain groups at least, that the governments who want universal mandates can have their motivations questioned. But for a while the heroic questioners of this set of received truths were vilified and ostracised, lost their jobs and their reputations. These things will not be reinstated when their work is vindicated. We work in a world that can and does sacrifice those with the integrity it needs most.
The genie that was loosed was allowing money to buy power. Graeber and Wengrow are clear about societies that recognised this danger and got their political arrangements right. Whether we can ever get the genie back into the bottle has to be moot. Arguably the present arrangements deliver a society that almost everyone finds oppressive and unrewarding.4 Allowing money to buy power was once a political choice and a very stupid one indeed. We don’t see ourselves as monumentally stupid but the evidence is there.
All these arguments get focussed by the feeling that we don’t have many political lives left. Mass migration triggered by climate change and war raises challenges we have never met before. The renewed sense of the chance of a nuclear exchange, and the infantile provocations that might lead there. The extreme sociopathic decision making of giant corporations wrecking political initiatives that might heal. And ecosystem collapse that we don’t even try to understand, the loss of vital diversity on a daily basis.
Politically there is little difference between stupidity and the inability to organise to implement sensible policies. Lets call it the Brexit stultification effect.
1 possibly related is this David Allen Green blog post: “[Three bills,] when taken together, telling us all we need to know about Brexit: that the exit was rushed and botched, that the exit has provided no practical benefits, and that that the exit will never be enough for many of those who supported it.”
2 consider the recent and ongoing case of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the subsequent halving of Tesla’s share price. How often had he made rash and impactful pronouncements on that very platform, now finding himself in possession of what seems to be more of a distraction than a business opportunity. Alongside other more business-like distractions such as SpaceX and its seeming lock on the future of satellite communications.
3 In Will McWhinney’s Paths of Change, dogma and absolute truth exist only in the worldview of a Unitary reality
4 r/aboringdystopia
