This article by The Atlantic covers a lot of great points about how the average citizen doesn’t have the psychological meaning-making capacity to understand the complex problems in our world today which is why populist leaders like Trump can often take advantage of them and use them for their own advantages to get and remain in power.
The problem stems from a failure to grasp the psychology underlying populism.
Psychologists have a more sophisticated way of articulating this distinction. As readers of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow or Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink know, the human mind exhibits two different systems of cognition. The first is rapid and concrete, focusing on primary representations of things you can see, hear, and touch. The second is slower and more laborious, but capable of abstraction and logical reasoning. In some cases, the two systems produce different verdicts. This can create persistent disagreement between common sense and expert opinion.
The problem is that a supply chain is an entirely abstract concept, and so might as well not exist for the average person. Nobody gets worked up about a supply chain.
People who are angry about the cost of living are going to focus on the last link in the chain, the consumer-facing organization, and that means the grocery store.
Where the article goes off track though is when it talks about what can be done about this problem of people not being able to perceive these complex problems. Its recommended solution is for left-wing politicians to only focus on the problems that are directly affecting people (e.g. rising grocery prices) without getting into the complexities of what’s causing them to indirectly occur. It does this even though it knows that framing problems this ways is wrong and “incorrect” because they aren’t “actionable.”
To do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about; by and large, they must also accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect.
Many of the problems that they hope to resolve, such as climate change, housing scarcity, and surging health-care costs, are complicated. This means that the policies needed to fix them are also complicated, and cannot be explained without ascending to the realm of abstraction.
Climate change, housing scarcity, and surging health-care costs are actually all complex problems not complicated ones.
The problem is figuring out what to do if you win. Because the slogans generally don’t correspond to actionable policies, making life better for people requires some sort of bait and switch.
In effect, the article’s recommended solution is that the focus of politicians should be on talking about what’s affecting people directly rather than trying to explain what’s indirectly causing these problems because it’s too hopelessly complex for people to comprehend them.
In other words, the article sees it as an “either this or that” situation. Either you explain things directly or you explain things indirectly.
That doesn’t help anyone though because you’ve still got a voter base who is voting on things that they currently can’t perceive and comprehend.
To solve this creatively, we need to stop seeing it as a “this or that” situation and perceive it as a “this and that” situation instead.
In effect, explain to citizens how the problems they are directly facing in their daily lives have emerged indirectly over time from deeper root causes.
In other words, people won’t understand how these problems are emerging and arising in their lives, until you can help them perceive and understand the complex scaffolding that is occurring below the surface of their lives.
So definitely start with the surface problems and then guide them down through the layers to the root cause.
All that said though, it is a hell of a lot of work to do. But if you can empower your voting base to actually understand these deeper issues, they can be collectively mobilized to work on them in ways that a voter base who can’t comprehend them couldn’t.
This is effectively what Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute of the Future, communicated in her book The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World within a chapter entitled “Governance Beyond Government.”
Basically what she communicated is that complex problems are emerging at such a rapid rate today that we can no longer rely upon a top down, hierarchical forms of governance by government. Instead we need engaged citizens getting informed and understanding the deeper issues of the day, so that they can inform and mobilize other people to work on them collectively as a whole.
The key word here is “informed.”
Fishkin and his colleagues have found that average citizens are able to make good decisions in areas as complex as local budgets, regional integration, criminal justice, and tax policy. Studies have shown that in the process, participants greatly increased their understanding of the issues and often changed their minds on the best course of action; that is, they made better and more informed decisions as a result of deliberately thinking about the issues at stake and hearing different views on the subject.
Marina Gorbis, The Nature of the Future
A perfect example of this would be the backstory of how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into government work by beginning her election campaign in April 2017 “waiting tables and tending bar” while operating her campaign out of “paper grocery bag behind the bar.”
Perhaps a much larger example would be how citizens of the United States during World War II mobilized themselves to collectively assist with the war effort, such as collecting scrap which even children could participate in.
To summarize what I’m getting at here is that complex problems often arise systemically from societies themselves. Thus in a sense, a society needs to realize how they are not at war with someone out there that they can blame but rather they are in conflict with themselves, due to their own perceptions which are causing these complex problems to arise.
Of course, it’s easier to mobile a nation against another, when you can point the finger and blame someone else. It’s much more difficult though when you begin to realize your own perceptions are causing problems and thus you yourself need to change and transform your way of looking at the world and yourself in turn.
When we are able to take responsibility for our actions though, learning from them, that’s when true change can take hold and transformations can occur.
Cheryl Dorsey, a CEO of a global nonprofit called Echoing Green that supports emerging social entrepreneurs, touches upon this (at the 9:30 mark) in an interview with her entitled Social Innovation and Social Just in an Age of Pandemics.
But the diagnosis that these systems aren’t working is the same diagnosis that we see from those who are animated by populist anger. Right. So again we come at the problem from the same vantage point. The way we have constructed societal forces are simply not working. I often talk about the weight of systems, systems residue, that are weighting folks down. People of colour. Marginalized folks. Women. We can go through all the forms of oppression. And these systems are exacerbating those.
So we all see it. However our prescription for what to do about it is radically different. Social innovators recognize that indeed there’s a problem but they raise their hands as engaged, committed citizens to say “Well it’s our job to fix it. We roll up our sleeves, we get to work, and we figure out what we can do.”
So much of the populist anger is a nihilistic one as you said Peter. It’s blow it all up, consequences be damned. And these conflicting forces that are butting heads, there has to be a way to engage more folks from the other side who are as frustrated as many of us are who are engaged in the work of social innovation but do it within the realm of democratic practice that provides a seat for all of us at the table. I think that’s the needle to thread. And I think we’ve got to figure it out and we’ve got to figure it out sooner than later.
