empathy

Here is what Strategic futurist Dr Richard Hames has to say about the reasons modern politicians fail to prepare for the future…

“It takes work and they do not have the time once all of their administrative duties have filled their days. We need to change the shared worldview regarding what is important and re-frame leadership in that context. But there is no time for such work.
The world has become so complex that most leaders are out of their depth. They lack a relevant toolkit and are in no mood to learn a new one because as leaders they are supposed to know and have the answers.”

Dr Richard Hames, Strategic Futurist

Fair call.

Our leaders have the wrong toolkit given that most carry around the one supplied to the stupid white man and no time to do the work to upgrade or to complete the artisanship any new tools would allow them. This lamentable lack of intent to retrain is capped off with a need to save face. No wonder there is no time.

What a mess this is.

There is one phrase that makes the most sense and that leaves some hope… “out of their depth“. This we can deal with if we pay attention. We can ensure that the next leaders are good swimmers.

How?

Create awareness of the complexities.

This is crucial although very hard to do. Europe has a refugee crisis that on no small part led to other crises like Brexit and the horrendous prospect of Boris in the captain’s chair. But why does it have a refugee crisis? Well, there are many people who would risk a sea crossing in a small boat to a country that will not welcome them rather than stay where they are in the land of their birth. It is so bad that they will also risk the lives of their children on the small boats in the hands of the unscrupulous.

Imagine what it must be like to make such a call; to risk the lives of your children. Don’t assume that the gold across the sea is a big pull to become a refugee, even if that might be your first thought, but think also about the push. Mortar fire, foreign soldiers using your garden fence as cover from snipers, food shortages that mean you have to risk the marketplace each day when last week a suicide bomber met his maker just where you buy bread. More bombs. If you live with this evidence you have a huge push and the risk to your children is worth it.

This, of course, should be an easy one that even Boris should be able to comprehend. Most of the world’s complexities are far more convoluted with predictable, unpredictable, and unknown consequences. What happens if the Greenland ice sheet melts, say by 20%? What would a theatre war centred on the Straits of Hormuz do to the global economy? What happens if the required 2% per annum growth in global food production is not met? Do we know what to do if unemployment goes over 20% thanks to some clever robots?

Whatever the complexity, the skill is to understand the feelings and motivations of the people closest to it. Makes their concerns the centre of thought and the guide to the solution.

For example, it’s not that we have climate change and that we could fix it with a trillion trees. It is that the climate is changing, will change, and, even with a trillion trees that we don’t have the land area to plant, the climate is more a people problem than an environmental one.

What will we do when it is too hot for one month and too wet a few months later only to be drought the next year? It messes with people’s heads and they want the government to fix something that is not fixable.

This is the complexity you need tools to handle. They are the tools of courage and awareness.

Some say that empathy is more useful than fear as the solution because “human sense of empathy is a greater motivator for us to join forces to protect each other and to fight for a better world.”

So there you go Boris, put your own stuff down and imagine what it is like to live the lives of ordinary people all around the world, not just those you want to vote for you.

Suppose you are a die hard Manchester United fan. You have been in this manic state since you first kicked a ball around the living room in your diapers. It’s baffling why Manchester United is the club that captured your undying soccer loyalty given there are numerous top grade clubs within spitting distance of your childhood home, however, you cannot question it for the feeling resides somewhere deep and unexplainable.

Along with this love of the Red Devils comes a dislike, some might even say hatred, for the club that plays at a ground just 6 km distant and wears sky blue. Your ire rises higher at any mention of jokers from other towns, Liverpool especially.

Now this rivalry with the opposition is no doubt part of the deep and unexplainable. It has something to do with the limbic requirement to compete and win.

Along with this genetic programming, nurture has imbibed you with the essence of local culture, defined your broader allegiance, and provided you with an accent. Who can even understand what those scousers are saying?

I’m sure you are with me so far, at least in principle.

You may not be a soccer tragic or reside in north-west England, but I guarantee there is something you are passionate about to your core. A tumult in your soul that has no apparent explanation.

Importantly, such passion is never truly extinguished. Sure it wanes, but come finals day or a beer around the barbecue, and the old passion reignites like a bushfire in a breeze.

Like it or not, admit it or not, tribal affiliation makes you feel good.

This is because the tribe has two highly desirable traits. First the tribe covets your loyalty, cares for it and protects it to your benefit. This becomes a delicious positive loop. The more you feel wanted the stronger the tribe and the stronger the tribe the more loyalty you relinquish.

The second highly desirable trait is that there are always other tribes.

So just as your loyalty is rewarded with warm feelings of belonging and place, so the tribe tests its mettle and your allegiance with rivalries.

And herein lies the ancient human condition as recognisable 3 million years ago as it is at Old Trafford on a Saturday. We love a good stoush.

In our modern, supposedly enlightened times, it is no longer necessary to attack Liverpool FC supporters, leave them for dead, capture their womenfolk, steal their pigs and eat all the yams in their grain store. It is sufficient to chant abuse from the stand and laugh when their striker scuffs his shot wide. But rivalry is crucial to the tribe. It feeds the loyalty process and without it the warm feelings are much harder to maintain.

Crucially this necessity for rivalry builds more than aggressive contempt. It is not admissible to speak these other thoughts because they are easily misinterpreted, but at some level you have respect for those scouser scum. They are, after all, tribalists like you. They are misguided in their choice of allegiance, deranged even, and yet without another tribe of near equal size and passion what would be the benefit in winning any encounters. Crushing minnows ultimately depletes loyalty.

Thankfully there they are on the terraces, giving back as good as they get, and always rendering that god awful song about walking. Curiously they are wearing the same clothes as you. They are as overweight and unfit as you, and, hey, isn’t that Bob from accounting?

In short, you empathise with the opposition support because you need them and because you recognise their image in the mirror.

The same thing applies to all other tribal rivalries that humans have invented. In the violent conflicts any empathy has wilted or died invoking a chicken and egg explanation. But in many others the empathy is still there and may even be the reason there is restraint.

One of these intense rivalries is over the environment.

Not the grab for land, water and oil that is at the core of many, perhaps all, wars but the rivalry that exists even in stable nations with well defined and uncontested territories.

On one side there are various tribes with members willing to hug trees or stare down bulldozers to protect the lesser spotted owlet even as the greater spotted owlet numbers increase to previously unknown heights.

In opposition are tribes with members in hi-vis vests or business suits who have never even seen an owlet.

This rivalry is ostensibly about the consequences of resource use. More strictly, who should get the benefit from exploiting natural resources or wear the opportunity costs of parsimony.

The consequences of resource use are real enough, far more so than the winning or not of 3 points towards the title race and a few months worth of bragging rights. Any human exploitation of natural resources alters the flows of energy and nutrients through the environment either directly – log a forest and habitat is changed or last altogether – or indirectly – burn coral and the climate changes.

Green tribes hate this outcome.

Brown tribes hate this outcome too mainly because it fuels green tribes out to stop them. Usually those with a development focus feel so strongly about the need for resource use to fuel the economic engine that they don’t even notice the consequences for future resource use let alone any undesirable externalities.

The trouble is that the green tribes have to get their hemp and their biofuels from somewhere in the environment. Every human leaves a footprint in the sand.

Equally the brown tribe members know that even though ‘a tree converted to dollars invested in the stock market’ is a well trodden road to wealth, on this road there are potholes, oncoming traffic and, heaven forbid, fuel shortages. Heavy boots do some real damage.

The kernel of empathy exists in these contradictions.

It comes through admitting that even the off grid, eco-home, tiny house still has a footprint and that with over 15 billion human feet on the planet, the tiny house option cannot be for everyone. It also comes from the notion held among some resource users that maintaining a resource for the long haul can be a better economic outcome given the resource is still there to be used.

Many also know that the environment always offers renewable solutions.

Then we have the option of incentivising resource use actions that limit the undesirable outcomes using the language of the economic tribe to change behaviour. We pay resource users to be careful. A weird compromise position that partly neutralises the conflict.

Here, then, is the thought.

When you next find yourself in a tribal situation, and this will probably be sooner than you think, look for the empathy. Try to find that connection with the rival that you know makes them just like you.

Should this situation have something to do with the environment and the empathy feel just can’t be seen, look harder, for empathy is there hiding behind the entrenched positions.