shiny happy weird and special
the most interesting conversation I had last year
Shortly after pressing fire on Wednesday’s post, I realised I had got distracted while writing it because I was thinking about something else with relevance to education policy. The most important way in which people responsible for policy are atypical and weird doesn’t really have anything to do with passing exams.
It’s much more fundamental than that. If you’re in the world of policy, pretty much by definition you think it’s possible to change policy, for the better. But having a high level of optimism and a sense of personal agency is by no means universal, it’s quite rare.
I am, to say the least, sceptical about drawing strong conclusions from surveys in this area, but qualitatively I don’t see how you could get results like this if it was normal to score highly for “agentive optimism”.
The subheading of this post is a bit misleading, because the conversation in question wasn’t really all that interesting (it was kind of boring actually), but it was the one that stuck in my mind and changed my thinking more than any other. It was when the anti-immigration protestors were bothering refugees at the local airport hotel, and I decided I probably ought to show up at the counter-demonstration.
I quickly (re)learned the elementary lesson of British street politics – don’t show up on time because no other bugger will. There were about half a dozen people there for the first hour of the scheduled protests, mainly arguing with each other and a few bored police officers over who was going to stand on which side of a street.
Turned out that this wasn’t a mistake after all, because the people who had arrived early to the other side weren’t the ones who were really into the cause (people I later described as “bald men from Plymouth with rancid vibes”). I decided to strike up some conversations, mainly thinking “if it all turns violent perhaps they’ll remember me and punch someone else”.
It’s a bit of a cliché that racists always claim to have black friends, but I kind of believed it. The thing that really struck me when I was talking to these guys was not so much bigotry, but an incredible, overpowering sense of pessimism. While talking to me, at least, they tended to agree that the refugees were people and deserved to be helped. (This was later borne out, when the local protests lost half their numbers, in a slightly farcical series of events which culminated in two local councillors leaving the Reform Party; one of the guys I talked to is quoted in this news story).
But they, more or less unshakeably (by me at least) thought it was simply impossible for Britain to provide that help. The consensus view on the other side of the police line seemed to be that our economy was stuck and shrinking, that there were no opportunities and absolutely nothing to spare. The people I spoke to had no hope whatsoever for their children and seemed genuinely surprised that I did for mine.
To make it clear, I don’t think it was me that was being weird on this occasion. But really – this is kind of a challenge for democracy. This is a worldview which, intrinsically and logically, can’t be represented in policy, because a precondition for getting involved in policy is that you don’t think this way. It’s not a coincidence or a weakness that reactionary politics is so full of grifters, cynics and wreckers – that has to be the norm. The weird people in ethnonationalist politics are the ones who genuinely believe that they’re trying to make things better, and I’d love to find a few of them[1] to try and work out what kind of mental structures they’ve created to remain reconciled with the environment they work in. I suspect that they would be similar to what Donald Cressey called the “rationalisation” which allows white collar criminals to view themselves as normal, non-deviant members of society.
One of my favourite quotations is from JK Galbraith:
“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”
I think the meaning of this has a lot to do with the importance of preserving and fostering a general baseline sense of agency and optimism; solving problems is important, but what’s absolutely vital is to keep the idea alive that the problems are soluble. Sorry that this Friday post isn’t in the usual light-hearted style, I guess.
[1] For what it’s worth, I did have some conversations with intelligent Trump-adjacent people in 2024, I noticed that even at that time, most of them were spending a lot of time working out what their red line would be to leave the movement and all of them have since done so.
I recall a session at Capetown University in 2002 when we were doing one of our MBA trips from RSM Rotterdam (the other was a year later to Sao Paulo). We had a lecture on the changes since 1994 (the fall of the Apartheid regime). The question was asked, why didn't the black population — who had been treated horribly ("You? An education? Why? You're going only to become a gardener anyway", or stories bout getting chemistry lessons where everything in an experiment had to be imagined as no materials were available) — did not exact revenge. After all they were extremely angry (and rightly so). The answer we got was instructive. The reason, so this professor said, was the leadership of Mandela c.s. who told the population: we cannot roll back the damage that has been done to you, but we will do everything we can to make sure that your children and grandchildren will not get this hideously unfair damage done to them as well.
The professor explained: "Leaders deal in hope", and this was the powerful hope they were dealing: hope for your children. Thinking about that at the time, I thought: "Yes, and managers deal in results. So, if you want to be a leader instead of just a manager, you should deal in hope.", which turned out to be correct in my observation. Leadership[ requires that you understand not just the anxieties, but above all the flip side of those: the hope.
That hope can be a false hope, though, if it is built on lies and such. Hopes built on tropes, for instance. There are good leaders (Mandela) and bad ones (take your pick). Bad leaders also effectively deal in hope. Donald Trump being a recent example.
And many politicians are just managers, not leaders. We need many of these too, because hope gets you only so far. You will need results.
The cliche-because-it's-true of union organizers has long been that what you need is anger, hope and a plan.
You've always got lots of 1. I think it's wrong to concentrate on 2 in isolation. Because if people show up to a demonstration they are already evidencing a desire to do something. Give them a plan that makes sense, and win a small victory in an organized fashion, and you give them the pleasure of solidarity. And that's what hope really comes from. It's also the only real antidote to alienation.
I think we can go too far in worrying how to persuade people with words. Collective doing that is not a waste of time is what persuades people. Practical problem solving and solidarity come out of a bias towards action.