
- 2 December 2024
- |Change, Leadership, Uncategorized
Looking at the modern world makes me feel increasingly old fashioned.
I am not talking about my clothes or my hair (although the currency of both may be called into question from time to time).
The passe habit I am referring to is the seemingly lost art of seeing both sides of an argument.
I have often asked myself whether it is a blessing or a curse to be able to empathise with both points of view in a debate. In my experience it certainly doesn’t always make life any easier. In fact, I sometimes feel slightly envious of people who can take a strong position, unaffected by the neurosis of nuance.
However, like so much in life, just because something is easier does not always mean it is the right thing to do.
It may be difficult to understand other people’s opinions sometimes but it is undoubtedly better for society for us to work together to resolve our issues and find common ground.
Unfortunately, it feels like fewer and fewer people seem to agree with me.
Taking extreme positions
Given what I have just said, it will come as no surprise that I am a political centrist. I believe it should be an inalienable right for people to create wealth, security and prosperity. I also believe this should come with an absolute responsibility to use some of that to support others who have less or who aren’t as fortunate, and to elevate opportunities for everyone.
In recent years, watching the news has become a pretty depressing affair for we centrists, as both the left and the right seem to increasingly condemn finding a middle way to the annals of history.
Let’s take just a couple of examples.
Immigration
Just the word ‘immigration’ has become provocative.
For some it seems to be a catchall term for all their worst fears about what our society could become. For others, even to acknowledge the undoubted problems which immigration can cause is tantamount to racism.
The truth is that there are arguably many good, practical reasons why a nation needs to secure its borders and control who comes in. It is equally true that immigration has been and can continue to be a great force for good, with many of our public services and industries propped up by people who have moved here from elsewhere.
Both of these things could be seen as facts.
It is not a fact that immigration is destroying our way of life. Nor is it a fact that anyone who feels uncomfortable about their society and community changing is a racist.
Why does it seem so difficult for us to have a sensible conversation without descending into calling each other ‘snowflakes’ or ‘little Englanders’?
Wealth and tax
A dearth of nuance and understanding is also evident in recent decisions made by the Labour government on taxation.
After years of poor investment in public services, there are many who – like me – think it is essential to direct more money to social care and the NHS. If an increase in taxation is necessary for truly wealthy companies and individuals in society, then so be it.
No doubt Labour would say their recent Budget is taxing those who can afford it in order to support those who cannot.
However, in reality, many of its measures show little grasp of the reality of people’s lives and businesses.
The recent increase in Employers’ National Insurance contributions is just one example, a move which will cost my own company £100,000s. For many enterprises this is the kind of extra cost which could put them out of business or, at the very least, see them slash plans for recruitment or wage increases.
There are many of us who are frustrated at the tax dodging behaviour of large corporations. We would applaud extra taxation on the likes of international banking groups or energy companies.
However, I have met absolutely nobody at any point in my life who feels the best way to solve society’s ills is to go after hard working family businesses and Small to Medium Sized Enterprises.
I can only explain Labour’s decision by assuming they truly have very little understanding of what it is like to run a small business. Perhaps they assume all founders and entrepreneurs are somehow fat cats, living a life of luxury on enormous profits.
Just in case you hadn’t guessed, this is usually not the case. Founding, running and growing a small business can be satisfying but also comes with long hours, sleepless nights and significant personal financial risk. Being ‘the boss’ can often be an order of magnitude more sickeningly stressful than being an employee.
Removing Inheritance Tax relief for farming families and making an enormous cut to the subsidies they receive reflects a similar unwillingness or bluntness at least – to empathise and understand.
There are, of course, wealthy individuals who purchase and pass agricultural land down the generations to avoid tax. This, by the way, is a loophole which I am fully in favour of closing.
However, the vast majority of farming families make a very small amount of money. They are, as the saying goes, asset rich and cash poor. They do hard, physical work, in tough, uncertain conditions, usually for love of the way of life rather than money.
Why is it so hard to approach these issues with some common sense and understanding – or just a bit of nuance? Why not talk to employers and farmers and truly understand their situation?
Perhaps, if those currently in Government had spent 100-hour weeks running their own businesses, or days on end waking up in the dark to wade through mud to barely make the minimum wage they would have done things differently.
Perhaps, if the previous government (and don’t get me started about them) had understood what it was like to live in social housing and felt the genuine stress of barely covering rent, food and energy bills they would have invested more in health and social care.
Ultimately, this isn’t a criticism of any side of the political divide. It really isn’t.
The issues I have outlined above are only an indication of a wider trend towards polarity and an unwillingness or inability to take a rounded view.
Three paths to polarity
It is true that there have always been people who have taken extreme positions. Throughout history, circumstances have contrived to generate polarities of view that have ended in conflict.
However, 20 years on from the founding of Facebook and well into the second decade of the age of the smartphone, I think we have to acknowledge three ways in which technology is eroding our capacity for critical thinking and the appreciation of duality.
1) Our attention spans are worse
We live in a time where an online video of longer than 30 seconds is considered too much for our brains to handle. We have even come up with (tellingly) an abbreviation, TLDR, as a quick shorthand to denote something we didn’t read because it was too long.
It stands for ‘Too Long Didn’t Read’.
You might even be thinking that about this very article!
A mental diet of Tweets, reels, Snapchat and endless scrolling has had a withering effect on our capacity for concentration. We are delivered information in bites and barely have time to take it in before another emotive morsel is thrown our way.
At the same time, we have lost any appetite for searching for an answer. We want to know things immediately. The speed with which we reach for Google to answer any question is only matched by how quickly we forget the information we have just taken onboard.
2) Information overload
We are being bombarded with more information than ever before. News outlets, food companies, fashion brands, friends, family, celebrity influencers and comical cats are fighting each other for our attention every second.
Digitisation has created a world where there is an incessant demand for us either to communicate or to engage with media.
This is not the natural way of being for a species which evolved in relatively small groups, living in – at most – a very slowly changing environment. This deluge of information is saturating our brains and taking up all of our bandwidth.
Technology was supposed to bring about a world in which we work less. Instead we are drowning in it, with potentially terrible consequences for our mental health, our ability to break free from work and our aptitude for reason and thinking for ourselves.
3) Lost in an echo chamber
The very business model of mass communication is built upon us spending more time online.
What are the best ways to get someone to spend time online? One is to reflect back to that person exactly the kind of world they want to inhabit. Alternatively, you can pull emotional levers to play upon biases, grievances or fears they already hold. You can glue people in place with affirmation just as you can entrance them with outrage.
The result is that we are all being put into huge echo chambers where we can identify with vast communities that believe in exactly what we believe. Our belief systems are being reinforced again and again. We spend less and less time engaging with people with a different worldview.
If we do, the experience is so disconcerting that we revert to the quick, simple, familiar value systems of the online world. Even if we do try and empathise with someone in real life, this experience is being evermore dwarfed by our virtual existence.
The fallacy of compromise
There is a fallacy in human thinking that the only way to satisfy people on different sides of a debate is to find a compromise: Both parties have to give up something in order to find a resolution.
In fact, a much more effective way is to actually listen to each other and take time to find out what is really behind the supposedly opposing positions through the perspective of trying to find out what people are FEELING rather than what they are thinking.
You can then usually build a position that satisfies everyone, with little or no compromise for either party. There is nearly always a way that gives everyone what they want.
Often you will find that at its core people want very similar things. When you approach problem solving in that way, it’s remarkable how often you can arrive at a solution that meets everyone’s needs.
However, the three paths to polarity have made us so blind that, these days, we don’t even try.
I came to realise this when reading an excellent book on parenting, and the moment I remember it’s name I will post here (it was some years ago). I actually read this book sometime after my own daughter was born but the principles of conflict resolution it outlines can be applied to people of any age.
The essential premise is that if you’re struggling to get your child to do something the first step is to try and understand what your child is feeling and why. There are, of course, often surface presentations of anger, accusation and denial that we all make throughout our lives. But, often these are only symptoms of a need for something more fundamental – an emotional response to a situation.
However, to understand someone’s real emotional needs takes time, concentration, devotion, openness and listening to what they feel and believe. It also requires us to look inside ourselves.
Begin with how someone feels
Conflict arises when we approach an issue by talking about the different solutions we want to adopt. Often these can seem irreconcilable.
For example: ‘I believe we should close our borders and deport immigrants’ versus ‘I believe we should let as many people come and live in our country as we can’.
If this is the starting point of a discussion it is very hard to see how the two sides will ever agree.
However, it can be very different if we ask each other what we feel about a situation and our emotional responses.
‘I am worried about immigration because I am worried there are not enough jobs for my family, I am worried my community will change and I will feel isolated. It will make our lives worse.’
‘I am worried that without immigration we won’t have enough people to keep running our public services and businesses, this will be harmful for the health and wellbeing of my family and community. I fear this will make our lives worse.’
By starting with the ‘what it makes us feel’ rather than the ‘logical argument for or against’, two opposing positions suddenly have a lot more in common – and we can emphathise more readily.
When we hear the emotional needs of other people, what someone is feeling, we are more likely to fundamentally understand what needs to happen to satisfy those concerns.
This commonality of understanding – what we feel as a human – is a much better platform to begin working together towards a solution.
It is an approach which can work in politics, in our personal and family relationships and in business as well.
The importance of engagement
Unfortunately, the echo chambers we are trapped in make us fearful of engaging with those with a different mindset. It is a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
For anyone who wants to understand more about these issues and how they can be overcome I would recommend listening to a selection of the utterly superb Hidden Brain podcasts.
Hidden Brain is available on all the usual podcast and streaming platforms – there are dozens of episodes exploring what motivates us, why we think what we do – and how to overcome some of the challenges I talk about this article.
Hidden Brain was actually recommended to me by my wonderful cousin Lynn Dede, an expert in communication for and with people who are non-verbal and I will be forever grateful to her for the hours of pleasure I’ve had learning from it.
The hopeful conclusion is broadly that if those with apparently opposing views take time to talk and listen to each other, understand what each other is feeling – then they can have great, constructive relationships. They just need to be willing to give it a go, or as the episode of Hidden Brain ‘Not at the dinner table’ explores willing to let go of differences entirely.
A revival of reason
If the trend for division, lack of understanding and fear of people with opposing views continues to grow then it could spell a very depressing future for humankind.
However, we can all take action to resolve it.
Humans, despite the many conflicts in our history, have a natural capacity for working together, for coalescing around a common belief, for finding a shared vision.
If we just make the effort to look up from our screens and talk to the person next to us on the bus or at the pub and give them a fair hearing, it is possible to rediscover our instinct for understanding. And, maybe we just need to ask people what they feel and be willing to listen to that because engaging in to intellectual jousting over a particular position.
Division may be all the fashion these days but we owe it to ourselves and our children to stop sleepwalking down the paths to polarity. It is time for a revival of reason, respect and critical thinking.
There will be dire consequences for us all if we don’t.