Here's some digital art I made recently, I hope you like it.
It's been a long and tiring day looking after my daughter. With her having severe disability, my job as dad stretches easily into nurse. That's all fine, however it does leave me with little energy. I haven't said hello to my fellow Steemers for a few weeks now, I write to loads of blogs and yes, I am still working on the habit of visiting this one. I heard somewhere that if you do something every day for a month that it becomes ingrained as habit. I hope to achieve this in slow motion by returning here every few days.
What I want to talk about today is the rise in populism. We know that people power has been a catchphrase for many of our generation and a couple of generations back too. We like the idea of people power, it empowers you and I. It makes us feel that we can make a difference. ON one side of a very big coin, this is true and good. We can all make a difference. But in our experience, can we truly say that people do the right thing? You may well do, I'm not questioning your behaviour, I'm asking us all to look beyond the self and gauge the general behaviour of our populous. In my experience, people make terrible decisions and they often spend a long time denying them. Look at the pollution for one example, or look at the people risking their lives to make it to Europe, it's not that much greener if at all for immigrants.
Why do people make bad decisions in large numbers? Because of popular thought. Popular thought is often entangled in emotional arguments with biassed evidence. We tend to accept biassed evidence when we have emotional reasons to, for example in the recent case where an ex-Russian spy was poisoned with a nerve agent in the UK. No-one in this country openly spoke about the fact the we ourselves had the chemical and could have used it, all eyes were on Russia. For non-British people, it was perfectly reasonable to ask British authorities to prove it was not their chemical. This is one example of how emotional attachment can cause us to neglect basic facts.
With people power, we are asking the large mass of people to make choices. We ask them to decide whether we do one thing or another. People are not stupid, even in large groups, and when asked reasonable questions like would you like to fund the schools or the hospitals we can give a straight answer. The problem with politicians and their parties is that these are abstract concepts. We are asking us to make a leap of imagination in order to establish if we want to vote for this person. I don't think many British people would vote for the results of austerity with weekly suicides and homelessness both on the rise, hospitals bursting into corridors, and schools crumbling around us, but we went ahead and voted Conservative anyway. Why did we do this? Is it because with Jeremy Corbyn in opposition there's never going to be a significant vote for Labour, or is it that the Conservative icon in the minds of their voters doesn't equate to the results of their policies? Likely a work of both factors.
The rise in populism that we have seen around the world is a direct result of people power being misused. We are not equipped intellectually to deal with international affairs of state. We are intellectually equipped with matters of home and life. When the popular argument is put forward, with an emotional bias such as anti-immigration, the excitement people feel that someone is listening to their intolerant views, or in other words when the intolerant are tolerated and validated, it allows the down side of the argument to go unheard. The people involved don't care about the down side when the plus side to them feels so good. The most successful populist politicians use several arguments, each one designed to reach into the hearts of a particular group of people who form a natural bias towards an emotive argument. When multiple arguments are laid out, whole groups of people can be attracted and once they're hooked on their personal reward, the rest of the policies don't matter to them. This is how populist leaders come into being. We see it with politics in all nations with democracy.
The antidote to this situation is to stop giving people abstract choices. Give people reasonable choices that they would make in their daily life, or can translate from daily life. Asking for us to vote for an abstract entity such as a politician or a political party in my eyes is where the flaw lies. We, as a whole, are incapable of making the correct associations and arguments to address the type of politics we are presented with.