46. Sometimes democracy hurts

It is interesting reading or listening to political commentators using phrases "how didn't we see it coming". The question here is "who is we?", who is included in this selected group and who is excluded?

'Democracy is not working' is being suggested by 'the losing side', in Brexit, US elections or any other electoral contest of these days. The blame is on: Russia, the FBI, Fake news and fake news sites, Facebook, Wikileaks, the uneducated, the baby boomers, etc, etc.

And then, 'the winners', seem to believe that a tight electoral result grants them the right to impose some sort of 'tyranny of the winner', where the other side should stay silent and let them do what they want, let them get on with stuff as all actions are somehow validated by a result that does not even represent the majority.

'Democracy does not seem to be giving the "right" answer'. It is too unpredictable or uncontrollable for some. "People are looking in too much", "they are looking around, looking at their reality", so "we need an external enemy", "which is one of the easiest way to engineer consensus".

Who is the enemy?

Historically speaking, the neighbour (the neighbouring town, city, country, empire) has been the perfect enemy. The neighbour marks the limit of what's not mine, the place where I don't have sovereignty. His house is not mine. He is not me. The neighbour is a "no". And so most of wars were between neighbouring countries or empires and ended up redrawing limits.

During the cold war, US and URSS were neighbours, who diligently fenced their claimed territories and kept fighting in disputed lands. With the fall of the Berlin wall, and then the iron curtain, the end of history was declared. US prevailed. There was no longer a neighbour to fight against.

So the enemy became internal. The collective solution failed so it is all about the individual struggle. The negativity we felt was now the enemy holding ourselves back, there was no alternative system to compare. So self-help books emerged, positive thinking. We also fought cancer and AIDS -an internal enemy- and terrorism became the political enemy, destructive cells that can covertly attack us inside our territory or hack our immune/defence systems so it does not detect the invasor is there.

Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his article "How Neoliberalism prepared the way for Donald Trump" a reflection on Umberto Eco's essay Making an enemy.

Shortly before his death, the great Umberto Eco drew in his brilliant essay Making an Enemy the following sad conclusion from his numerous studies of the matter: “Having an enemy is important not only to define our identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth”. In other words: we need an enemy to know who we are and who we are not; knowing this is indispensable for our self-approval and self-esteem. And he adds: “So when there is no enemy, we have to invent one”. A codicil: “Enemies are different from us and observe customs that are not our own. The epitome of difference is the foreigner”.

Well, the trouble with a foreigner is that all too often he is indeed foreign – not just in the sense of obeying alien habits, but also – and most importantly – in that of residing beyond the realm of our sovereignty and so also beyond our reach and control. It is not fully up to us to make of such people enemies and put our enmity in practice (unless, of course, they cross boundaries with the intention of settling in our midst). If sovereignty consists in the “decisionist” capacity of acting solely on one’s own will, then many a foreigner is unfit to perform the role of a proper enemy according to Eco. In many cases (or perhaps in all?) it is better to seek, find or invent an enemy closer to home and above all inside the gate. An enemy within sight and touch is for many reasons more proficient (and above all easier to control and manipulate) than the seldom seen or heard member of an imagined totality. Already in the Middle Ages the function of the enemy in case of Christian states was perfectly performed by heretics, Saracens and Jews – all residing inside the realms of dynasties and churches by which they had been appointed. Today, in the era that favours exclusion over inclusion while the first (but not the second) is fast becoming a routine measure to which well-nigh mechanically to resort, internal choices assume yet more attraction and facility.

Today is the inauguration day, and America is torn in front of the choice of enemy. Terrorism with all its relevance, is losing its edge in terms of driving people's fears.
Where is the limit of what we are not? For some, it is the president-elect himself, a property developer, salesman and expert hacker of our attention system. For others, immigrants and the fussy entity that conforms the establishment. Some are dangerously pushing for the come back of the golden enemy, Russia, or probably some small "nasty" country that appears as a more legitimate target (North Korea?). Some of those will be driven by interest in the business of a new arms race and making Europe the new disputed territory, but the public is probably more driven by denial that the same America that fantasises through Hollywood with heroic Presidents, wise and impeccable, addressing the world, fighting for freedom and defending "our way of living"... that same America... well, voted for Trump. "Russia is the one that hacked us", somehow surgically impacting the outcome of the election of the swing states (Hillary Clinton won the popular vote). "It was not us, it was fake news" even though scientific predictive models that take into consideration the relative strength of a candidate in the primaries pointed out at Trump as the most likely winner, against what polls were saying. Polls which also offered certainty in Brexit and the Colombian referendum, somehow making an impact on many indecisive voters who decided then not to bother.

Trump's preference -at the moment at least- seems to be China, but it is a not new idea as the encircling of China with 400 military bases has been going on for years, as John Pilger denounces in "The coming war on China". It is the third largest economy after US and the EU. China has an expansionist agenda, but less military than others. They've been investing in Latin America and Africa in infrastructure, trains, energy projects, etc. It's the biggest trading nation and developed a manufacturing sector with low wages and almost no rights whilst US needs to face the consequences of Nafta, the erosion of the manufacturing sector and a fake distribution of wealth through access to credit. US is tempted by the promise of protectionism while we now hear the Chinese communist President Xi Jinping speaking in Davos in the World Economic Forum in defence of globalisation. This is definitely a curious change.

Hacking is about obtaining unauthorised access, but it is also about opening up short cuts, looking at system's vulnerabilities. And one of our vulnerabilities is not looking at the vulnerable. We are easily distracted by celebrities, outrageous statements and with the idea of the external enemy. An enemy is useful in rhetoric terms, it keeps us clean. It is not time for self-doubt in front of an enemy. Easily accepting a narrative that increases military tensions between nuclear powers is dangerous and should be closely scrutinised. There were real political reasons behind the break on the Democrat's administration and forgetting about those would be a distraction. Today we watch a Hollywood version of Les Miserables on TV and can deeply emphatise with their struggle. We can see, from the distance that those miserables were subjected to a system of structural injustice, when there were dreams that could not be and that we could not force a narrative of meritocracy when listening to Fantine's lament:

But are we really paying attention to Les Miserables of our time? Are we able to emphatise with their situation and their struggle?

Plurality means that sometimes we are not right, or that sometimes we are on the losing side even if we are right (of course, we are), we are forced to look at the other side of the argument and rescue whatever truth lies there.
This US presidential election as well as the Brexit vote, some say, gave the wrong answer and the seed of doubt is planted: doubting the system, doubting democracy. Rather than saying that is not working, I'd say 'it's complicated' or even that sometimes 'democracy hurts'. But we should not let this pain blind us to the reality that keeps on moving and is trying to distract us from very important tasks (such as strengthening democratic values and institutions, overseeing all now open trade agreements that will define how work will be distributed and how capital will flow globally) by preparing a menu of enemies,

Andrea

PS: the 2016 Davos, predicted that Trump would lose and this year they seem to be discussing inequality more seriously...

40. Who cleans up our mess?

Looking at the picture of the big Glastonbury clean up, the pictures of Messi crying after his team's defeat in the Cup America final and announcing he's quitting from the Argentine team, and probably more transcendentally, all the post-Brexit debate, I started to wonder about this issue of what do we do in front of negativity: the waste left or that feeling we get the moment when we find a limit to our desire, our impotency, to "that" no.

A long time ago, I had to go through a psycho-technical test that was part of the pre-screening for a new job I got. In an interview, I had to answer a "Desiderative questionnaire", the sort that asks you "what would you like to be if you weren't a person?" and "what wouldn't you like to be if you weren't a person". First I was asked about animals and then objects. Even if it was many years ago, I remember my answers. To the question "what object wouldn't you like to be", my reply was "A toilet". I was asked to explain why, and the reasons were clear to me: "I don't want people to come and deposit their own metaphorical shit to me, expecting me to say nothing back, swallow it and thus making it magically disappear. Additionally, no one likes to take care of a toilet". Life or karma had me finding many perfectionists on my way, people who cannot digest their own negativity and need exactly that: to preserve their own perfection by depositing imperfections onto others.

The post-brexit reaction gave us a lot of examples from both sides: xenophobic attacks on immigrants from people who feel themselves now enabled or entitled to publicly and aggressively express their anti-immigrant sentiments. And even if not at the same scale of anti-social behaviour, the ones that needed to disqualify and express disdain for the 17 million people that in their eyes were ignorant and did not deserve a right to vote. 

The post-brexit reaction gave us too a feeling of disgust. The one that comes when the limits between the outside and the inside are breached. When we are confronted with something that we know exists but it is suddenly visible. In seeking the false promise of taking back control, the UK has lost control. All the internal discontent that a carefully structured parliamentary system normally filters was made evident by a referendum. All the internal tensions in the political parties themselves were also exposed: conservatives, labour and even UKIP have shaky leaderships and divided bases. A system that has democratically imposed TINA (there is no alternative) is left with no answers in this puke-aliptic scenario, also exposing that outside the current consensus there were no ideas being seriously developed.

In the following video, Slavoj Zizek speaks about toilet's design (this post is heading to be a bit scatological... I know). and he speculates a relationship with ideology. It's not long and it is quite funny.

In this video, Zizek speaks about the three main toilets designs in the European trilogy: the French approach, radical, you don't see it and has to disappear quickly; The German, philosophical, you have to contemplate it for a while; and the British, pragmatic, it has to float before it goes away. And then we have the Brexit reactions, with Junker's position -expressed in French- then followed by Hollande, the radical view: it has to happen as quickly as possible no matter how painful (also shared by Martin Schulz), Merkel took the more contemplative approach, and the British are trying to hold on to their pragmatism whilst the toilet seems painfully clogged. 

Immigration is definitely a difficult topic. As an immigrant, and having gone through the experience of living and trying to integrate into 4 different foreign countries, I recognise that it is rather easy to stop a serious discussion getting into details and dismiss any criticism on a cultural base, but this is probably because current economic ideology prefers to remain invisible.

As I discussed in "Walls, resistance and adopting a new motherland", immigrants act like messengers that come to challenge our view of the world, whatever that is, a view that we are not so willing to change. 

Economic immigrants in particular, remind us that the prevailing economic view encourages a free-flow of capital and needs to allow a free-flow of people to enable the creation of efficient hubs and avoid concentration of trans-national capital in places people cannot follow, which would lead to transnational tensions. However, immigration and emigration are not always cold rational economic decisions: it touches our own attachments and sense of belonging and therefore people don't "free-flow" nor they root and integrate as easily as capital, even if economists would prefer them to. 

An immigrant may be touching our own impotency to adapt to theses rules of the game and remind us that we are expected to follow economic opportunity and leave our town or learn a second language (something not very popular in the UK at the moment) and leave our country. 

Immigrants may show us the true face of our country, that relies on them coming to avoid investing on its own people's education (which I discussed in Education: freedom of being v system architecture), one of the main engines of social mobility. We can look at the picture below and see its light, the positive contribution immigrants offer in opening up to new ways of thinking, being an example of collaboration and bringing all what was invested on them on education, but also we can see that there is a shortage of trained nurses and doctors and how restrictive and inaccessible that training is and wonder what's going on in Spain that is losing highly qualified people (3 out of 7 here come from Spain). 

  

The mother tongue and the narrative of our motherland

In this video, Hannah Arendt talks about many things, but in min 36 she speaks about her own emigration experience, and her relationship with German as her mother tongue in comparison to the other foreign languages she had to learn. In min 42-45 she speaks about her return to Germany after 1945, and how listening to her mother tongue being spoken gave her a feeling of joy, even if probably her relationship with Germany as a country was different and more distant.

We feel insecure if the exo-uterus in which our mother tongue used to be ever-present, changes and becomes unfamiliar but... who is working on the cultural integration that is needed? (particularly remembering that integration is something that the whole group does, not only the newcomers). 

However, immigrants are an easy target because they are visible. The things that are slowly changing and disappearing due to globalisation and technology (and in the future more things will change due to climate change) are less evident and there is a lack of narrative in this area, no one is clearly naming what's going on at any other level than the corporate narrative which portrays this progress is undoubtedly positive. 

A government impassive and unresponsive becomes unfamiliar, so it must be the fault of Europe, or so everyone was told during the previous election campaign. These sentiments mix economic realities with political and cultural ones.

On the other side, these "ignorant" voters who voted for leave are also messengers to show that our view of the world, where individual success (including our own access to higher education) does not isolate us from the weakening structure that sustains society, those collective aspects and mechanisms that are based on solidarity and try to bridge opportunity gaps; nor it can deny that any economic model can be criticised and challenged by the people that feel most negatively affected. 

And this is not exclusively true for Europe. Here Joseph Stinglitz explains how making the pie bigger (increasing GDP) could benefit everybody, but that this does not mean it would. And this divide is very much real in the US.

There are multilevel fractures at play: economical, cultural, educational, political, that seemed to have converged in one referendum.

Was the Brexit vote the best way to deal with these issues? Probably not.  

But would any self-reflection be possible without such "an event" (at UK and EU level)? Sadly, maybe not.

Digesting negativity - a woman's work?

Here come the Glastonbury volunteers that make visible the clean up process and show us that it is not magical or glamorous. It takes work.

I talked about the missing women in politics in Revolution is in the hands of women. So not surprisingly, several women are raising as candidates in the Brexit aftermath, claiming that in a time of turmoil they would be more practical, less testosterone-driven and able to collaborate (whilst men tend to shy away of high risk positions). Iceland's PM wrote in an article: 

"When I have spoken on the importance of women taking on a greater role in the running of the world, I have sometimes quoted a poem by an Icelandic poet, Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir, translated by Salka Guðmundsdóttir. It is simply titled “Woman”.

When all has been said

when the problems of the world

have been dissected discussed and settled

when eyes have met

and hands been shaken

in the gravity of the moment

—a woman always arrives

to clear the table 

sweep the floor and open the windows 

to let out the cigar smoke 

It never fails"

But also, because historically women have been this watery entity containing negative emotions, in a way acting like toilets, very practical, making it all magically disappear, or so we hope. 
I do not claim that the fact of being a woman automatically makes anyone a good candidate. Nor we can ignore that men may be avoiding a leadership claim due to the high political risks to their careers. I do not know either if any of these women have the vision needed in this moment, nor I necessarily agree with some of their views that could easily follow the shock doctrine and impose even more neoliberalism. But it is interesting how in this context, the proficiency they may have is more apparent: Nicola Sturgeon is praised by her strength and Theresa May was not even in the radar when Cameron and Boris were defining the future of Europe in a pissing contest (technically speaking). Others explain that this is simply so, because men tend to run away of a situation that is politically too risky.

But women come to the scene not only for their lack of testosterone, or being this watery human device, but also because they are expecting to offer a bit of 'mothering' skills. Mothers being our most secure attachment, tend to be the person with whom we have no fear of discharging all of our negativity whilst making us feel secure. In this sense, that motherhood appears as a topic in the leadership race makes sense. On the one hand, attachment theory of motherhood was brought to the table -unlikely or not- by conservative candidate Andrea Leadsom (demonstrating a very deep duplicity as the current economic model moving towards ever more extraction of wealth and a rent-based economy -which she supports- comes from hungry babies). And on the other hand -funny enough- Theresa May is already being called the nation's nanny. Nanny. Not the prime minister, not a leader. Nanny, which indirectly suggests she has no children or that this mothering role should keep some distance and impose some discipline. We should not forget either that Angela Merkel is called Mutti -mummy- in Germany. 
So the context in which this is happening is not demonstrating massive progress for women per se (fulfilling a function of cleaner, human toilets, assuming all the risk or becoming our mothers) but we can never underestimate the effect that normalising women leaders has on the future.

At the end, we can dwell to infinity and beyond about how to describe the social fracture: if it is generational, class-based, religion-based, race-based, education-based, urban v no urban... which side are you on, and so on. But to mend the fracture, the only thing that is important is deciding what do we do (together) with the impending reality. But before that, we need to purge this emotional waste, because if we remain in shock a lot of things can happen without anyone even being able to react.

And here comes Messi's son, hugging his father, giving him contention and as psycoanalyst Daniel Waisbrot points out learning at the same time that even the best in the world sometimes can't achieve what he wants. He suggests that Messi has saved his son in this act because if he remembers it, he won't grow up in the illusion that for some people, there are no limits to their desire, for some people "the other" does not represent a limit. And it is a reminder for us too that we should not think there are people who are not entirely human so we can rely on them to come to clean us up (the anti-hero, the depositories of our projected imperfections) or lift us all up (the superheroes) and make us believe that there is life without confronting at some point or another our impotency, the other's desire or "that no", and walk through the emotional mud it leaves behind. That limit that makes us reconsider "who are we then?" and "what do we do now?", and teaches us to acknowledge at the same time that this limit we found still hides multiple possibilities. 

If he remembers that he, as a boy, was able to offer this contention, hopefully he'll become a man with this capacity too, not needing anyone to blame nor need external toilets or fake mothers when things become mess(i)y. ta-da! :) 

Andrea

PS: 

2. World conflicts are a reflection -and a result- of own internal conflicts

Looking at the world in the way I suggested in the first post, where it appears as a projection of ourselves, the question of whether there is an ordering principle is turned on its head.

The order we see in the world is an emergent structure that arises from recreating our own structures inside our minds into the relationships and the way we organize ourselves in groups and societies. 

The bigger the organizations are, the more we will instill in them an urge to build and express an identity and asserting their place in the world. We instinctively know they need strong bonds to ensure cohesion and a coordinated action. They'll express personality traits through symbols, imagery, processes and culture ('the way we do things here'), a physical presence (territories and buildings), boundaries (what's in and out), ways of managing money (or energy in the broader sense), a name, even declaring values and missions, with which we 'identify' ourselves.

We create organizations anthropomorphically because is what we know. In fact, the list of elements is not too dissimilar to how biologists describe essential elements of life.

As a direct consequence, they will also mirror all our most primal conflicts in their own collective behaviour:

• Inferior versus superior thinking conflicts: What gives me the greatest changes of survival?
  • inferior: Survival, territorial, rigid -'reptilian thinking'; fight or fright response; repetition of patterns.
  • superior: full brain -emotional+rational-; collaboration; innovation and creativity.
    This is also related to our use of power and freedom, how much we use power ourselves and how much we surrender. This will be influenced by our primal hierarchy conflicts with our parents (overcoming the 'child status', the 'becoming' of self, etc.).

• Left versus right conflict: How do I make decisions? (also female versus male, logic versus values, holistic thinking versus detailed analysis, etc).

Again, because we, individuals fear survival, the organizations to which we belong-as a collective entity- will too and will create defense mechanisms to protect their existence.

A nice example -which I chose just because they explained what had happened with words that are in line with this explanation- is the negative vote of women bishops in the Synoid of 2012 of the Anglican Church. In this case, not reaching consensus was a threat to the institution. 'Holding the church together' as expressed in the blog was a survival decision and not a decision based on values or logic, which fortunately came a couple of years later on with the eventual approval. The same is happening now in 2014 with the Catholic Church Synod that will debate family issues. Cardinal Kasper has described that some cardinals fear there will be a domino effect and that everything will collapse.

So organisations, that are entities we create collectively, feel fear through our collective fear. I fear that if the organisation collapse, I'll die too. The funny part is... that most of the times, we don't.

How much of the individual survives in a group

Throughout history, civilization has been driving 'superior' survival tactics, such as collaboration and innovation. It was only through these superior tactics that mankind could deal with their biggest threats and embark in bigger quests -as killing big animals-, therefore entering in a positive loop of evolution. In fact, there is no doubt that it was only through this collaboration and innovation that clean water and vaccines were made available widely and are responsible for the biggest improvements in human survival and longevity.   A very nice talk about this is given by Robert Wright with his  non-zero-sum theory (win-win). 

However many people working together does not mean they are collaborating in a way that respect each others individuality. And this debate is all over the place right now in every single conflict that is somehow debating the nature of unions. Of course United Kingdom is the best example as it is debating at the same time its role in the European Union, while Scotland is about to have a “yes/no” vote for independence. I am surprised however how little these two subjects have been related by the media and debated together in a more generic way. Not even Nigel Farage -who raised a critic voice about the weakening of the democratic system in Europe through pulling power away from people- engaged positively with the Scottish case, which is based on similar grounds.

“Whose wish is it?” is in my opinion the key question to think about when a Union is taking an action. If it is truly a collective wish, it is a collaboration. When it is the wish of one made true by the strength (the libido) of all then, there is domination. In this case the leading force in the union becomes a 'devouring mother' -the one that feeds from the libido she steals from the children, depriving them of expressing their own identity-. Many fairy tales are based around this conflict, normally through the figure of the witch or the step-mother (representing the bad mother). In Europe, particularly after the Euro crisis, it was not at all uncommon to hear news saying things such as "these new developments in Greece are not what Angela Merkel wants". Even more, most presidential campaigns in France, particularly Hollande's, were based on an anti-Merkel rethoric, they spoke about her dominion -in fiscal policy- and the need to stand our ground in front of her/Berlin (funny enough, the bear, another mother symbol). 

There are a couple of points here. Even in domination, all (surviving) parts have been 'rewarded' at a survival level (eg not accepting this, it'll mean death to me). In every hierarchical structure there is a surrender of power and an acceptance to limit our own freedom. But of course, this seeds resentment in both parts involved (it has also a high cost for the dominating force) that sooner or later will be expressed.

But going back to the emergent structure point, this hierarchy issues exist because we are still in the process of individuation (separating from our mother discourse, discovering and expressing our own identity and reclaiming the power we had surrendered in fear and from the external discipline and law imposed by the father rule). I still find it quite ironic the fact that due obedience is normally not a legal argument of innocence as everyone is expected to act on its own moral ground, but in the case of Edward Snowden, it's also very clear how difficult is to act on due disobedience (freedom to disobey).

Unions of individuals

The other point is that expressing everyone's wishes efficiently and 'democratically' is a challenge. The whole of the Star Wars series goes around this (the senate of the Republic not being able to agree, allowing the rise of the Empire). True collaboration, the one that respects individuality requires many things... that we all know ourselves, that we are able to feed ourselves by our own libido and that we recognise and relate to the other with trust and empathy. There are many people talking about empathy -for example the whole of the Pink Floyd work (through Roger Waters lyrics) goes around this theme.

Left and right (feminine versus masculine, creation and purpose, etc) conflicts are becoming increasingly visible, particularly in the context of the evolving role of women in society, but also with the renewed debate of role of the state (feminine) versus the private sector (masculine), with the crisis of capitalism and so on.

The trickle up effect

We are living with these conflicts everyday in our lives and as a result they emerge at collective level.

For real change to happen, it will have to occur at every level, starting at the individual. Self knowledge can give new insights to our own behaviour as individuals as, ultimately, whenever we find ways to resolve these conflicts ourselves (our own fear, our own tolerance, our own freedom, our own exercise of power etc) we'll be contributing to the collective improvement. 

Self knowledge needs to go beyond the conscious level and explore the shadow -what we don't see, 'The Dark side of the moon'-, with all the light and darkness that comes with it. Engaging in recognising and naming our own bunch of emotions, ideas, blurred images and memories with words. The "verb" is our personal organizing principle. The architect of our consciousness and the architect of our relationships. What it is said, is. What was never said -good or bad- by ourselves or by the world waits in the shadow the moment we dare to look and even more, to name, to see, to integrate, to resolve.

AB - Feb 2013, re-edited Sep 2014

Links:

Robert Wright: the logic of non-zero sum progress. Ted talks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcZFIy2mfyE

Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilisation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g

Steven Pinker: Language as a window into human nature. RSAnimate
http://vimeo.com/34205198