Trust and Risk, Fun and Freedom
What is lost first: trust or freedom?
That yearning for a freer, happier society? It’s the memory of a high-trust society re-surfacing at a time when we’re suffering the miseries and pointless rigours of a society stripped of much of its trust. There’s this bottom line: a low trust society bends towards state control, caution and greyness; a high-trust society will bend towards liberty and fun.
What comes first? The low-trust society or the authoritarian government? I don’t know, but they certainly seem to be mutually reinforcing. Low trust societies demand and possibly need authoritarian responses. Authoritarian states dissolve what trust remains.
We’ve already spiraled circles down this doom loop. It used to be an outrage if anyone, let alone the government, took to reading your private letters. Now it’s a very fair bet that every email, every message, every Twitter, is marked and assessed. (Yet we’re still properly outraged at ‘phone-hacking’.) Not so long ago, lorry drivers revolted at lowly tachograph being fitted (‘the spy in the cab’). Now the government routinely spies on where you drive, and local councils want to use this surveillance to fine you if you stray from the permitted path.
Not so long ago, someone losing their job because they held unpopular opinions would have raised cries of ‘McCarthyism’ and ‘blacklisting’. Tell that to HR tyrants. Book-burning used to be for Nazis (or rather, for Nazi students). Now publishers pay censors to make sure no ‘problematic’ books get published in the first place. How much easier abort them in gestation rather than to print and then have to burn them?
Dizzy from the doom-loop.
Caroline Ross (aka The Uncivil Savant) recent wrote: “It's time to practice goodwill now while it’s still easy, or at least possible. By which I mean, let’s stop cutting channels in ourselves, our communities and our countries, because it’s how all the nutrients we’ve accumulated (over centuries or more) are draining out.”
I think she’s right. We rather badly need to figure out how policies, and personal actions can stop the damage, and rebuild trust within our society. I have some suggestions.
Trust is absolutely fundamental to society, and to nation. But trust is also a response to experience, that is, to risks taken and adventures survived, or risks perceived and activities and opportunities for new experience foregone. So we need to look at both components: risk and experience.
Risk: we need to accept that well-intentioned measures to limit risks - particularly for young people - will necessarily limit their actual experience, their enjoyment of risks born, adventures taken. And that reduced potential for living life will probably stay with them for life. That’s a terrible loss.
We must develop real resistance to the endless parade of NGOs and public sector bodies warning about the danger of this that and the other. These are not only insulting and infantilizing, they erode the body politic’s immune system. That is, they are not protecting, they are actively doing damage, and we must not feel shy about protesting that damage. And, being bureaucrats, they also encourage the expensive extension of the state into areas where personal judgement, personal choice, and social mores are what really matters.
It’s not as if there isn’t already a massive problem in our faces about this. Frank deBoer recently got to the bottom of this: “Extinguishing mystery is, in general, an assault against the young, and what is the internet if not a giant machine for eliminating mystery?” With no mystery, no adventure. With no adventure, no living with risk. So we’re already in danger.
This means that the starting point for re-building towards a higher-trust society, with the freedom and fun that promises, is our personal willingness to gradually raise the level of risk we are prepared for ourselves, and our loved ones, to take. Yes, it’s that personal.
To take one example, I proposed giving young people free train travel during the summer months. I want them to have adventures, and discover the country they live in. People will say, isn’t it dangerous? And I’ll say: ‘Yes, there’s a risk. That’s the point. But do you really think there’s no risk staying at home and looking at the internet? Are your kids going to learn better about the world doing that?’
Experience: But there’s also experience, which is the only touchstone by which we can assess the risks taken. If your neighbourhood is crime ridden, or if you think it is crime-ridden, you will be much more risk averse - society will start to slow or degenerate. What can we do about that? Once again, the effective answer is probably not to ‘rely on the police’, because, I’m afraid, not only are they not up to the job, they seem not to be very interested in rebuilding social trust any more.
But perhaps effective local politicians and local leaders, do have a role.
Look at what SDP councillor Wayne Dixon is doing in his Leeds ward - his twitter-feed is chock-full highlighting messes that can and will be cleaned up. From that, two positive things can come. First, of course, the neighbourhood gets cleaned up, which in itself may help restore social pride and security. Second, though, it shows that someone really cares about results. I believe that humiliation begets anger, which begets antisocial behaviour. So treat it at source: local politicians that genuinely give a damn can help break that circle. If that’s effective - and we shall see - ultimately social trust is rebuilt.
Maybe we should go further. We should question the knee-jerk official mistrust of local vigilantism. Popular wisdom decries and deplores people ‘taking the law into their own hands.’ But what is so inherently dangerous about local people taking responsibility for the law being upheld? Why shouldn’t they help the police enforce minimum social standards of behaviour, minimum standards of personal public safety? Properly trained, is this not a useful way to rebuild communities, and engage with ideas of social responsibility? It has been done before (ask the ghost of Goh Keng Swee).
Remember ‘Reclaim the Streets’, and ‘Reclaim the Night’? What were these but social democratic vigilanteism?
This also needs to be acknowleged: a willingness to absorb a huge number of immigrants with different backgrounds, customs, expectations and behaviours, dress codes, and languages will, absolutely inevitably, no matter how ‘good’ the immigrants are, result in a lower-trust society, at least initially. Why? Because no-one knows quite what to expect. We all have to learn.
Hence it follows that if trust-levels are to be maintained or restored during and after periods of mass immigration, work at nation-rebuilding must be done. Emphatically, this will not be done by seeking to identify and promote grievance. At the extreme limit, such behaviour risks regressing society into accept a number of pre-modern primitive taboos (deployed either for pre-modern religious purpose, or post-modern intolerant purposes ). Rather, such efforts will contribute very directly to social erosion and consequent authoritarianism.
So Caroline Ross again: “Before we can do anything, we first need to let go of the compulsion to slice everything into finer and finer segments, delineate all our differences and oppose those only marginally different in view or allegiance.
[We must allow] “our goodwill to radiate outward as soon as we have developed and stabilised it in our own friendship group, family, fellowship, locale or organisation. Our clump, if you like. When we have stopped cutting ourselves off from each other, and instead, knitted ourselves back in, (which takes risking trust), we can start to clump together with the other tussocks…
Our best near term hope, in my view, is that Starmer follows through on bringing PR into the Lords. I actually think it’s a dreadful idea, but as soon as options like the SDP pop up in elections where they might win seats, they’ll win by enormous margins. And while FPTP is holding Con and Lab together, once SDP and other, better alternatives to the current shower are receiving more airtime, the current shower will flow down the drain remarkably quickly….
But I doubt Starmer will follow through. At least that will save us from an elected Lords.
Not sure how else to get in touch, but do you check your Twitter DMs? Thank you