Part one “BILLIE”
Maybe every week or so there are articles in the media and on social media about this or that person being elected and also being extreme right, for the most part or extreme left, sometimes.
This sort of binary analysis is always a bit confusing and obviously very polarising. It does make it easy for someone to support one political faction or the other because it is very similar to the sports team model. X support’s this team because they are great/likes the colour/most of his’her friends support that team. The celebrations after an election win are similar to those that happen when “our” team wins. It’s all very faction based and doesn’t take into consideration people’s psychologies let alone the smelly rubbish bins in front of the meeting rooms.
So let’s have a look at Billie, s’he consider themselves to be centre left. S’he might find it difficult to explain why, but s’he see themselves as being relatively progressive/liberal but they also like stability. S’he are quite taken by this/that politician who is seen as being centre-left. Mostly Billie feels some affinity with people who say they are centre left, Billie mostly feels very far away from the others, especially the extreme right and left. Billie heard that the ext right were mainly racists but Billie likes Indian and Chinese food so rejects the ext right. Billie can’t make head nor tail of what the ext left goes on about, in fact Billie doesn’t even understand what the ext left is. (based on a real person)
Billy decides to get involved in politics and does quite well in their adopted party. S’he are voted as the new representative for the forthcoming elections, which is nice. S’he then set out to put together a manifesto presenting their ideas. Which is normal. Some people read the manifesto, relate to it,believe the promises and go on to vote for Billie. Which makes Billie and the other members of their political faction very happy.
So far so normal
But what about Billie? what is s’he like? Well that is a very different thing and depends on a wide variety of parameters which we can explore. The question here isn’t whether or not Billie is centre-left as s’he says, the question is really about Billie’s personality. We’ve all got one of these, as far as we know, and you have probably noticed that your personality can vary according to the situation, time of day, alcohol level, who you’re with etc. Same with Billie and any politician.
People identify with some position or other on the horizontal line above, mainly because we’ve been trained to see the world this way. Yet people who identify themselves as being progressive/liberal may actually be pretty conservative. This was the case in a village where I worked for a time. The Mayor had got the votes because he said that he was “green” and wanted to shake things up a bit and make the local community more “ecological”. As it turned out, when he started his mandate, everyone discovered that he was by nature deeply conservative and spent the next few years preserving what existed and avoiding any change. He got a new carpark installed thus covering a whole new area with tarmac. This was seen by some local people as not being very ecological. When I discussed a project with said Mayor I was fascinated by the dichotomy between how he saw himself, progressive/liberal/ecological and how he behaved, conservative/antiecological. He isn’t alone in having a sort of split between his personality and his political persona.
We can change the simple arrow schema above for this one
The horizontal line is the allegiance line or the “how I see myself” line. In general people, thanks to the French revolution, will see the left side as progressive/liberal and the right as conservative. The vertical is the personality line, it reflects a person’s true nature and gives an indication of how they will tend to react when confronted with conservative or liberal ideas.
Most people tend to fall in the brown zone which doesn’t sound very nice but it was the only colour I had left. There are a lot of triggers that will automatically change how progressive or conservative someone feels :
Group force. Most people will go along with the majority, eventually. We don’t really like feeling excluded.
Hunger. People are less keen to adopt new progressive ideas when they are hungry.
Unknown space. When people are somewhere that is unfamiliar they feel less relaxed and less inclined to take what they may see as a risk.
Room full of strangers. Many people will feel a bit alone and so more conservative.
Stress. Feeling harried or hurried, feeling harassed or just having read or heard some bad news means people will tend to be less progressive.
Smells. Back to the teaser in the 2nd paragraph! People become more conservative when they have been confronted by a bad smell.
The existing political factions perpetuate a sort of smoke and mirror effect that divides people along “party lines” that have little or no meaning. Those who are elected to any sort of political post will spout on about their allegiance to some sort of political credo but will make decisions based on their psychological profile. And this profile isn’t fixed. The vast majority of us are governed by people who are not aware of their personality traits and thus cannot compensate for them. This is a major problem at all levels of governance.
Finally, for part one
We quite often see articles or hear people going on about the “lack of turnout” for an election. This is generally seen as a bad thing and these superficial critiques don’t dig further to find out whether or not the people who don’t vote are maybe doing something else. This is often the case. Fed up with feeling disenfranchised, even when they have the right to vote, people have increasingly turned away from the “system” to become players in their local affairs. This is an unsung trend which is becoming more and more strong. Even more interesting are the links that these people are making between their local communities.
We are confronted with some major crises, the existing faction based political systems are not up to the job of seeing us through to better times. It is time to stop turning towards the next “elected saviour” as, and you may have noticed this, nothing serious gets done.