How the world is changing despite how you may feel about it: or why the British election is indicative of who we are.
Understanding the changes taking place in our lives and on our planet demands a lot of flexibility. As creatures of habit we tend to develop a world view and then to stick to it. But what can we do when the world itself fundamentally changes? How should we react when everything around us starts pushing us toward the unknown?
So the British Elections actually have a lot to tell us about why we are the way we are. Many Brits, like many people throughout the world, understand that Brexit is a terrible mistake. But Britain has voted for it in the name of getting something done, of getting past all the embarrassing parliamentary dithering, of standing up to a perceived threat to British autonomy and identity.
On the other hand, Europe under the Union has been forced to face difficulties that it promised to save us from: lower incomes, waning government aid in health and welfare, a weak economy that is closing thousands of businesses each year and costing thousands of jobs we have been trained for, rising costs of living, an inefficient job market and basic existential insecurity. Apply all that to a society so fragmented that we often live far from our loved ones, endure unsatisfying daily relationships, and are numbed by daily reports of atrocity, greed, global warming, violence, racism, oppression and injustice.
It’s more than human beings were designed to tolerate. We are neither rational nor instinctual. But we are human beings. We all try to find rational solutions to the challenges of an irrational world. How can we get out of this mess? And in the meantime how can we sustain hope and maintain our balance when the earth keeps shifting underfoot? I believe it is going to require a greater existential understanding of how we perceive ourselves.
To make ourselves understood, not only to others but to ourselves, we devise a narrative of who we are. We are afraid that to erase that narrative would be to lose life’s meaning. Our narratives are how we make sense of ourselves and bestow upon ourselves a kind of special significance. In fact, ceasing to define ourselves by what we do and how we survive and how we relate to other people means not that our lives will change, but how we perceive it.
That’s how humans make sense of themselves and of their world: they tell themselves stories in which each of us has a specific role. We’re IN the story, we have a present and a future.
In today’s documented reality-check series of programs and problem-solving ideas, we have lost the narration in which we exist. This has been made quite obvious since the fall of the Berlin Wall and, consequently, the Soviet Union. Once you have no story to tell, no one can believe you. The story within Communist ideology was destroyed and no one has as yet replaced it.
And that brings us to Boris Johnson’s incredible recent victory. We all know, or at least most of us know, that Boris isn’t really interested in programs or details of problem solving. Certainly in no way close to those of Jeremy Corbyn’s. But you see, programs and solutions are not stories in which I exist. They are rational explanations of how to solve problems. And, I believe, people are simply not interested in addressing many of problems they face. But fit us into a good story and we climb aboard. Boris, like Donald, gave the public a jolly good story, and they ate it up because he convinced them that they were part of it.
A list of solutions is not very interesting unless you are well versed in the problems at hand. Most people are not, and not because they are stupid or indifferent, it’s just how the preoccupied human mind tries to make sense of what’s going on. Some very intelligent and sensible people, who have voted Labour for generations, voted for Boris Johnson, well knowing who he is. What fired their acceptance was the story he told and how they fit into that story. He didn’t go into any details (he probably doesn’t even know the details of Brexit himself), but what counts is the energy of his story: “we can do it, let’s do it and get it done with!”
It’s an appeal that ties together the present and future in one phrase. It tells us what happens next. Obviously, his campaign had very little to do with reality, but that is the point. Reality is a vague perception in the chaos of one’s own mind, and it teems with contradictions. Logic is supposed to resolve contradictions. But a story, like life itself, allows contradictions to coexist. As Niels Bohr once said, “you’re not thinking, you’re just being logical.”
So, in order to understand what’s happening, what’s happened and why, we must abandon reality a little bit and leave logic to it’s strictly useful purpose (helping people decide how to make practical decisions). Everyone doesn’t need logic but we all need stories and, above all, we all need to find our place within them. That is the key to understanding people and how they act. So let’s all stop being logical and start thinking.