ruthless pragmatism

the enemy within, and without

One of the original purposes of this ‘stack was to follow the principle “take jokes seriously and metaphors literally, and you will be surprised what you discover”.  In that general theme, I’ve noticed a little linguistic tic in some recent public statements – the use of the word “ruthless” as if it was a synonym for “diligent” or “competent”. 

I originally thought that this was a Labour Party thing, and that it just reflected the fact that they had spent so long fighting internal factional enemies that “ruthless” had just become a general purpose intensifier.  But looking around I’m not so sure – the Institute for Government wanted to “ruthlessly prioritise tackling regional inequalities” last year, and the SNP were promising to “ruthlessly focus” on support for entrepreneurs and infrastructure back in 2022!

It seems odd to me.  There’s just nothing particularly ruthless about having priorities and focusing on important things.  I think the idea (the oldest source I could find with a cursory look, from New Zealand in 2018) is that there’s a sense in which single-minded, obsessive focus on a goal might be considered “ruthless” if it means ignoring everything else that’s important.

But … that would be a bad idea? Like if there was another pandemic, floods or something, then you don’t want the government to be ruthless about that.  Failing to respond to new events and concerns because you’re focused on something you decided to make a priority in the past is a sure fire recipe for failure. 

So I think the reason the r-word has caught on is closer to my original guess; that people like the implication of meanness it gives; it’s a cousin of “willing to take tough decisions”.  You have to be ruthless in ignoring or discarding policies and priorities that aren’t in the charmed circle.

And even more so, it seems suggestive to me that when “ruthless” crops up in an article about the current government, you can be pretty sure that a mention of planning law reform is not far behind.  Presumably nobody would be so crass as to suggest that it would be a growth strategy to identify NIMBYs, then go through their bins and social media history to find something that would discredit them (presumably?).  But there has always been an element in Blairism that diagnoses a big part of the UK’s problems as caused by “the forces of conservatism”, who block progress and who might need to be dealt with ruthlessly.

When you put it in such general terms, it’s quite a widely shared idea – I don’t know whether to call the theory that the natural tendency of the system is growth and that this only fails to be realised because of the actions of wreckers “Whiggish” or “Maoist”.

 But I don’t believe in it myself.  Growth comes from good decisions.  Making good decisions inherently involves taking the risk of bad decisions, like the Groundnut Scheme.  If all you do is try to eliminate bads rather than trying to create goods, you’re going to end up disappointed.