Handling the Horrible

 Earlier today, I was walking through Parliament Square in London and - inadvertently - observing the protestors.  The biggest, loudest group was an anti-Brexit protest, pointing out how terrible an idea Brexit was: how it would damage the economy and make it harder to maintain the funding of valued programs.

This triggered a bit of a Buddhist response from me: I agree with them on most of the facts, but I still feel this is not a healthy response.

Wherefore Brexit

Brexit is a strong contender for greatest own goal in the history of the United Kingdom - up there with Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler.  In one fell swoop, it:

•  royally buggered up trade with the continent for a protracted period;
• removed our ability to comment on European regulations, without removing our exposure to the regulations themselves[1];
• gave other financial centres in Europe - which could semi-legitimately claim that at least they weren't under the thumb of morons - a chance to steal London's lunch[2]; and
• re-opened the gaping cultural sore that is the Northern Ireland / Eire border.

Moreover, it didn't even meet the needs of the people who originally pushed for it.  There seems to have been a clique of businessfolks who thought that the real problem with British Conservatism was that it was too damn soft on the general populace and too heavy on the tax-funded state intervention.  And clearly this was all the fault of those blasted socialist Europeans.

So by blockading the proverbial beaches they could turn good ol' Blighty into a neo-conservative paradise.  Where the beggars on the street were British beggars, where the government existed only to stop poor people shooting rich people, and where taxes were nil or less.

Unfortunately (?) this didn't work for roughly the same reason that turkeys don't vote for Christmas.   Turns out, the UK has got away with a lot of dodgy financial shit over the years because no-one in the big European tent was willing to haul them over the coals for their tax-haven ways.  That era has ended, and any attempt to become Europe's off-shore financier will get us a Grade A arse-kicking from all the European countries losing tax revenue as a result (i.e. basically all of them, with the possible exception of Luxembourg).

Similarly, all those welfare programmes that the Brexiteers thought would be better off privatised were actually very popular domestically, because - despite some evidence to the contrary - most people in the UK are not rich sociopaths.  Leaving the EU just made it more obvious who was trying to abscond with the family silver, even as it removed several levers by which these thieves in the night could be held to account.

In all, Brexit is the quintessential example of the infamous diplomat Talleyrand's old saw:

C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute.

It's worse than a crime, it's a mistake.

So how did something so ridiculous get through?  A whole bunch of reasons, none of them positive.  There was the establishment keen to distract attention from its own SNAFUs.  There was heavy lobbying from plutocrats.  There was positive write-ups in the part of the British media that thinks owning the liberals is its own reward.  From less shamelessly-biased sources, there was lot of views-differ-on-shape-of-Earth reporting.  And all of this over time horizons short enough that the real state of affairs couldn't come out in the wash[3].

The final word

But here's the thing: the British public did actually vote for Brexit in the referendum.  Even if they were lied to or otherwise misled, they chose to put a tick by the "Leave" box.  And they did so primarily on the basis that (a) it sounded entertaining on telly, (b) the tabloids were all for it, and (c) their mates from down the pub liked to take the piss out of Remainers.

That is the reality of the situation, and we have to live with it or go barmy.  You can blame David Cameron and the Conservatives who launched the referendum (I do), or the Labour stalwarts who didn't want to piss off their own party's xenophobic wing by pointing out the obvious (I do), or the talking heads who blithely lied about the bright future we'd share if we waved two fingers at our main trade partner (I do), or the mainstream media groups who abjectly fail to apply due skepticism to any sufficiently popular idea (I do), or Rupert Bloody Murdoch (I do), or even the European Union for being insufficiently interesting to the average Brit (I mostly don't, because said average Brit is pathologically disinterested in policy).  But none of that changes the fact that a fair vote was taken and sanity lost.

Protesting at this point feels less like an appeal to a higher court and more like an attempt to work the referees.

Reading the notes of the last meeting

It's also not a particularly new reality.  For context, I highly recommend John O'Farrell's book "Things Can Only Get Better", which sheds cruel (and often hilarious) light on the politics of the 90s and prior. One new fact that entered my head from this angle was that a lot of the classic "crazy Leftie" scare stories of the era - things like the local council that insisted nursery schools sing Baa Baa Green Sheep - were made up out of whole cloth for the purposes of ramming through legislation.  Plus ça change...

Around the turn of the century, progressive groups scored some significant wins, most notably the mainstreaming of LBGT rights and the increasing awareness that historically disadvantaged groups were still suffering the consequences of said history... and, in many cases, were still being actively shat on.  We got kinda used to winning, or at least seeing our losses as part of a general upwards trend.

If nothing else, then, the recent turn-arounds should be a strong reminder that changes in the political atmosphere are, even in a democracy, not necessarily reflective of changes in the underlying population.  The head of progressivism should probably have been more uneasy about wearing the crown.

Or, as Sir Terry Pratchett memorably put it:

And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

What do?

So what can Technobuddhism - aspirational secular Buddhism - teach us about dealing with this situation?  Well, the "secular" part is less immediately relevant, but the other two are doozies.

 First: aspiration.  As a Technobuddhist, I consider it a virtue to seek progress in society, in the sciences, and in my own life.  However, it's important to define "progress" in a way that doesn't leave you vulnerable to negative outcomes outside of your control, feeling like you've failed for not managing to yank the Titanic's rudder away from the iceberg.

Sometimes progress means moving forward into a better world.  But sometimes it means sustaining the current good world.  Sometimes it means making the good more resistant to the bad.  Sometimes it means accepting some forms of bad and seeking to make things better along another axis.  And sometimes, when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it just means making things get worse slower than they would have done without your efforts.  Think "Schindler's List" for that last.

Secondly, Buddhism.  This teaches - in very brief - that we should respond to our dissatisfaction by controlling our impulse to care.  Different schools have different takes, but the consensus seems to be: you're not trying not to care; you're trying to have a healthy relationship with your emotions.  I'll be talking about this a lot in future posts.

Your emotions exist.  Pretending they don't, and that EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY FINE HONEST, will just create headwinds for your mental health, and in the current world that is not something any of us need.  So: mourn for the world we thought we grew up in, where the majority of the population were basically decent.  Then meditate until you achieve some sort of personal stability.  Then move on.

Because, in this new world of sociopathic tribalism, there is a lot of shit that needs doing.

[1]  I've worked a lot with the European insurance regulations, aka Solvency II.  These are a heavy pile of paper... but that's because they solve a legitimately complicated problem.

 Immediately after the Brexit referendum, we started hearing Conservative Party apparatchiks making noises about how they could slash this big pile of red tape... then quickly going quiet as saner voices pointed out that (a) our regs still needed to maintain parity ("equivalence") with Solvency II if our insurers and reinsurers wanted to do any business in Europe, (b) rolling our own framework wouldn't necessarily produce less paperwork, and (c) British insurers had already done the heavy lifting of implementation.

[2] Regardless of your opinion on London being one of Europe's financial (and tax evasion) capitals, it's fairly obvious that unplugging that particular inflow of money from the national economy would not have good short-term consequences for the domestic population.

[3] Although, I (ironically) hasten to add, more time would not necessarily improve matters.  Creationism has been around for the last 150 years, purely on the basis that the number of adherents they lose to reasoned argument is less than the number of impressionable kids being taught this bollocks at their local Christian youth club.  Similarly, more time might have just let the assholes responsible break out even more marketing budget.