fear

People were suffering. From austerity, hardship, erosion of their mental health, state-sponsored discrimination, and the uncertainty of a changing world.

The government wasn’t listening. The government wasn’t leading.

Then visitors turned up in shiny buses. They spoke of important things like control, democracy, money, jobs. They talked about a distant shadowy entity that was doing the people wrong. They talked about the modern-day raiders it was sending to take things away from us.

They raised the flag of a big change and taking a stand.

The people, filled with the restless energy that wants things better, weighed down by lives where control seemed missing, said, ‘Sure, why not?’

And here we are. In a place where, it turns out, not many of us really wanted to be.

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If we had better politicians, maybe we wouldn’t be here. Most of them are deaf to story. That’s what lost Labour the last election: the failure to have its own story people could believe in, and to tell it loudly. Although it’s much improved (though uncomfortable in its skin), it still doesn’t seem to have grasped this. And in any case was muted by a media focused on the Tory civil war soap opera.

We needed someone to see the stories that were growing and take an authoritative stand in their path to shine a light on the truth. But maybe that wouldn’t have worked anyway. People talk about the rise of ‘post-factual humans’, and the experts and politicians who did speak out seemed to make little impression.

Once the energy for change was ignited, it didn’t want to be dampened by any outside influences, having been denied for so long.

We have, at least an end-point for the Cameron era – though the prospect of what might replace him is terrifying. I guess it is appropriate to give him credit for time spent. But let’s not forget he has been an awful prime minister, and history will remember him so. At least he wore a nice suit, literally and metaphorically, which others on his team might not have done.

But he consistently refused to fulfil the core purpose of the job we took him on for: serve the people. And wasn’t as if nobody pointed it out. Routinely, every few weeks, thousands of people took to the streets to protest about what his government was doing. He was the Protest PM, the archetypal bad ruler who wounds the land.

Maybe there’s a slim chance that we can remember something fundamental:

If people are suffering, politics has work to do.

It certainly has work to do now. People are bruised on all sides. EU leaders feel like we’ve beaten up the thing they spend their lives making, and their instinct is to lash out in return. People here who voted Leave are seeing the shining vision dissipate, replaced by difficult work, unintended consequences and broken trust.

The energy for change has not been satisfied, I think. Only blown off steam. As it builds up again it’s likely to become bitter or hopeless or hurtful.

Maybe, just maybe, we can press pause and recognise that the country needs healing. It need sorting out properly. The question is whether we can interrupt the freight train of ‘how things are’.

It could so easily descend into right-wing subjugation and hatred of anyone who’s different. Many of us fear it.

So maybe it’s time for a shout, a howl, a roar.

A stop and think with a cup of tea.

Why can’t we have a proper constitution? Why can’t we have proportional representation, and break the myth of red team vs blue team to embrace multi-party politics built more on consensus than antagonism? (Goodness knows people in the red and blue teams are pulling apart anyway.)

Why can’t we have citizen’s income? Why can’t we have community banking? Why can’t we have a well-funded public health service? Why can’t we support the people who most need it with generous humanity? Why can’t we have a massive drive for clean energy? Why can’t we boost microbusinesses, creative industries and social enterprise?

We could do all these things and more. We could. Except that’s not how things are, you see.

Well, newsflash. Things aren’t how they were. Suddenly, shockingly.

Pain won. Is it going to keep winning? Or shall we, you know, leave it?

 

Right now, the EU referendum campaign has been raging for a while here in the UK. It’s been full of the language of fear, anger and confusion. And we see that across the rest of our politics, and in what filters through from the US.

There’s a lot of surface noise, but are there things behind it? I think so. Let me suggest two things that are going on in people’s minds. Here’s the first one, that affects pretty much everybody.

Our boat is adrift.

More and more of us are aware, on some level, of stories breaking down. We absorb ideas and narratives about the way the world is and how to live in it. They were passed on to us when we were young and reinforced over the years by authority figures and cultural momentum. We followed the path they outlined, so it ought to have worked (whatever that means for us), but it isn’t. Problems are not getting solved: they’re getting bigger.

Most people just want to live good lives within a framework that makes that possible. They don’t want to have to question the big picture at every turn. They expect that when things go wrong there’ll be a process of working through it and then we can all continue.

It wears on the mind when nothing can be relied on and loops are never closed. A boat continually making random course changes creates an energy of uncertainty and frustration, and a want for things to get better.

Eventually that energy must go somewhere. It may come out in outbursts that we wouldn’t make if we were more relaxed. Often, it tries to resolve itself by jumping to a position on issues, and then we get emotionally invested in defending our ‘solution’ even if it’s not a good and wise one.

We look to our leaders to guide us through these choppy seas. But the crew seem to be in a cabin getting drunk.

Here’s a second fear, which I think lives in many at the top in politics (and perhaps in the corporate world too). Their earlier life taught them that they would be kings of an ordered, stratified world. But they’ve found it falling away like sand, replaced by one that’s fluid and interconnected. Rather than adapting their maps, they spend all their energy trying to get back to the old place where they were secure.

They scramble to stay on top of a slowly levelling heap, while calling for our sympathy about phantom ‘elites’ telling them what to do and outsiders coming to do us down.

In this frenzy everything can be sacrificed and nothing can be trusted. Anything that doesn’t fit the sepia-tinged picture is a threat: faces, languages, clean energy on the skyline, running society according to values rather than expediency…

And they whip and wheedle us to row in their direction. They direct the energy of our uncertainty against their own targets. But never help us resolve it.

Look. I have sympathy for anyone locked in their fears. But when we put people in high positions and pay them a lot of money, we can expect a higher standard of self-awareness and service.

They don’t have to be like this. A few days ago we were punched in the gut with the murder of Jo Cox MP. The shock was magnified as she turned out to be the kind of politician we’ve been wishing for, taken away before most of us knew what we had. There are others, even if the traditional media don’t find them theatrical enough to show us. Politics does not have to be awful, if enough people say so.

Society is not a stage for wealthy and influential people to act out their fears. It’s the boat we’re all travelling on. But those people have spent years driving it round in circles rather than getting us closer to a better world.

We need to indulge them less. And embrace each other more.

It may be scary to live in uncertain times. But we, ourselves, together are a powerful resource. If we look around we see stories of what creativity and inspiration can do.

Let’s not be frightened into sailing away from shadows on the water. Let’s tackle the problems of the world as it is rather than fighting the battles of the old one.

Let’s hail the other boats nearby and help each other steer the best course we can: a fleet heading toward the sun.

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Overlapping on this topic

The language of Brexit is about them, not you – me on Medium

Change – two pressures, and jumping in odd directions  – me on YouTube

My books ‘Crowd/Control’ and ‘Planet of the Bubble People’ – Amazon author page

Michael Dougan, professor of EU law, giving actual information about sovereignty, trade and the consequences of leaving – video on Facebook

 

This post originally appeared on my site The Upward Path