Surviving Among Idiots: The Alarming Rise of Know-Nothings. Reactions to BREXIT 2016

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BREXIT,  ORLANDO, The 2016 ELECTIONS, SCHOOL, GROWING UP

Modern life is complicated, and unfortunately some people are just not mentally equipped to deal with it.  So I may well have to rethink my strategy of throwing all I know at my students; some of their tiny minds are not ready for much more than counting up to twenty-five.  But I have that desperate instinct to push them to counting to twenty-six, which would probably endanger the ability of some of the weaker ones to count as far as they actually do.

What got me thinking about this is the recent (June 2016) vote in Britain (in what follows, I'm going to write "Britain" instead of "The United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Island", or whatever it stands for) to leave the European Union.

The vote took place on Wednesday, June 22, and by the following morning the vote was declared narrowly in favor of Britain Leaving the European Union (hereinafter EU).  [I could be off by one day here.]

So that my readers, both of them, are on the same page as me, The membership of Britain in the European Union means a lot of things.  Economically, all the members of the EU are considered to constitute one entity, which means that no customs or other tariffs are charged for goods transported between the countries.  Demographically, because all the members of the EU are considered one entity, anyone in the EU can move freely between the countries without being held up at borders for immigration barriers.  It also meant that people, regardless of where in the EU they were born or naturalized, are free to take up employment in any EU country.

Some Brits who haven't thought things out clearly, especially those in the parts of Britain where "foreigners" from the EU have entered the employment market (and begun to put pressure on the availability of jobs), have got into the habit of blaming the EU for the rising unemployment among their younger compatriots.  Other Brits simply resent having to learn the social skills needed for interacting with "foreigners" (form the EU) with their crazy speech and strange habits.

As always, a class of leaders has risen up in response to the needs of the people.  In this case, they came forward to champion the cause of the xenophobes, and the "culprit" they have settled on is the EU.  It is the EU, they say, that has got us into this mess.  (In actual fact, it is the Conservative Party, which now leads the government, that has impoverished the national coffers, putting pressure on those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.  There is something called "Austerity" that has been going on in Britain, which means that the poor have to make do with less Government support.)  They pointed out that the cost of membership was several million British Pounds per year, which Britain (like every member nation) had to pay to the EU.  But they ignore the fact that the membership gives Britain some benefits in terms of reduced tariffs, and so on, which reduces the net cost a good deal.  The cost of EU membership pales in comparison to other actions the Brit Parliament has taken, namely massive reductions in taxes for their wealthiest citizens and corporations.  Scores of reports of individuals and corporations (such as Netflix) have emerged that suggests that friends of the Conservative Party have received favored tax treatment.

What happened soon after BREXIT?
The "Leavers" rejoiced when the votes were counted.  They had won the referendum 52% to 48% (or with an even narrower margin), and the British government was now saddled with the task of following through on the decision to leave the EU.

Pretty soon, stocks around the world began to lose value.  Why?  Because stockholders assume that businesses with resources in either Britain or the other EU countries would not be able to deliver the volume of goods, or the quality of goods, that other businesses required, or that the goods would cost more.  Why?  Because a lot of the production in Britain depends of resources from the EU, and vice versa.  The British Pound began to lose value relative to the dollar, because (presumably) currency dealers expected that Pounds would not be useful to carry.  (In the currency world, if enough people think a particular currency has little value, it actually begins to have little value.)  Foreign nationals in Britain began to panic, thinking that they would have to leave soon.  British nationals in Europe began to panic, thinking that they would be forced to return to cold, damp Britain.  The political leadership of Britain began to panic, wondering how to proceed with the process of renegotiating their economic and diplomatic relations with the EU.  The EU government began to panic, wondering how to handle the exit of Britain, how to settle on the least messy arrangement with the Brits, and whether other EU countries would also want to poll their populations with referenda about Leaving.

Finally, actual Pro-BREXIT voters saw the economic turmoil, and began to panic, seeing that it was a silly idea to vote to Leave rather than Stay.  Clearly, many of them had simply voted to Leave for frivolous reasons, and now regretted it.  These folks are called RegrEXIT, and they (and others), nearly 3 million strong, have signed a petition to vote again.  Many of those in the Remain camp are now demanding to know what the plan for leaving the EU had been.  Was there a plan?  OK, what is it?

Regrets
Obviously, you can't vote on leaving the EU multiple times.  It has to be a once in a generation vote, otherwise it becomes a joke.  The important thing is that everyone should vote; repeated votes run the risk of disgusted voters simply staying away from the polls.  Every time a referendum is second-guessed, it puts all future referenda, on any question whatsoever, at risk of being disregarded as frivolous.

[Added later] There is a strong body of opinion that the Referendum (on BREXIT) was only advisory, in other words, it was just to let the Government know what the people wanted.  Interestingly enough, democracy does not mean that the majority get what they want.  The way that popular sentiment is factored through to the decision-making body is intended to safeguard minority interests, expert knowledge, and legal requirements, before it is made into law.  This could be viewed as interference with the will of the people, but it is also a safeguard against ill-advised ideas of various kinds.  So, though in this case it looks like a bad idea, technically the British Parliament can simply refuse to implement what the BREXIT vote indicated that they should do.  The vote was not the clincher of an existing act of Parliament; it merely pointed to a Bill that subsequently had to be voted on anyway.  The Bill may not pass, which simply means that Parliament had decided that Leaving was not in the best interests of the UK (an expert view; after all, Parliament has slightly greater insight into the issues than the population at large does).

Bafflement
Shortly after the vote, the questions that were most often asked on Google, by Brits, were: What is the EU?  What are the other countries in the EU?  (If you want the whole list, send me an email, and I will Google it for you.)  We have to think: how does it happen that Brits don't know these things?

Modern life is complicated.  There are many approaches to dealing with complication.
Ignore.  One school believes in ignoring complication.  If you ignore it, it will probably go away.  There is a danger in generalizing limited experience; some things you ignore do actually go away, like a minor headache.  You can't do a lot about a headache, and often they do go away.  Other things don't, like a pedophilic priest, or a ignorant member of the school board.
Oversimplify.  This is a related strategy, and many well-meaning people adopt it.  Simplification is clearly a good thing; to call something oversimplification is actually a judgment.  It means that an explanation or an analysis has been deemed simplified to the point where essential properties or information has been lost.  Obviously, most often the determination of "oversimplification" is after the fact, and represents a lost opportunity.

[Complication and Complexity are actually two significantly different things.  Complexity describes a thing that has many parts.  Complication describes a thing that has been made difficult by some extra thing(s).  Both words described some system with multiple parts, but the word "complicated" suggests that the complexity is a hindrance to dealing with the thing.]

We here in the USA tend to think that Brits are all more intelligent and wise than we are.  That is because they talk with that funny accent, and they have years of practice sounding bright, whether or not they really are.  But this BREXIT referendum has clearly revealed that the vast majority of those who voted for Leaving had only the slightest inkling of the benefits of being in the EU.  For months they had suffered an onslaught of Leave propaganda, I suspect from certain xenophobic and chauvinistic leaders who exaggerated the liabilities of remaining in the EU, and suppressed the benefits of it.  The benefits are subtle, and difficult to persuade people about.  (Presumably the Leave leaders themselves were not bright enough to completely understand the issues.)  After a brief period in which these Leave gurus will enjoy their victory to the hilt, they could be saddled with having to take the leadership in creating a New Britain that attempts to retain most of the desirable features of the Britain that they knew, when it was in the EU.  One wonders whether these Leave leaders have the intellectual equipment for the task.  When Remainers ask them: What is the Plan, it could be a genuine request for information, but more likely it is a pointed reproach for thoughtlessly going into a process in which the outcomes --either way-- would not be pleasant.

Well.  That's all water under the bridge.  But, among these infrabridgeal waters are the following:

(1) Before the Referendum, the public had to be educated by ALL their trusted leaders, in words of one syllable, what the benefits of Remaining are, as well as the drawbacks.
(2) The public had to be told, in broad terms, what would happen if Leaving was ratified.  (The temptation to make this eventuality more dire than it really was had to be resisted, though, in hindsight, it does appear to be pretty dire.)
(3) Given the difficulty of carrying out the procedure for Leaving, the Referendum should have been called with the proviso that unless there was at least a 2/3 vote for Leaving, BREXIT would have been considered to have failed.  It's all very well to vote to Leave, but it puts a severe burden on those tasked with renegotiating to establish a post-BREXIT Britain.  It makes perfect sense that Leaving should not have taken place without a sizable majority in favor.  (Again, in hindsight, this seems the most glaring omission from the preparation for the vote.)

Now that BREXIT is a fact of history --and it seems silly to plan on a Redo, as if the British public was a bunch of irresponsible children-- the question is how to negotiate a new relationship with the EU that (A) gives the British people the least number of penalties for leaving, and (B) still has some penalties, otherwise other EU nations, especially the wealthiest, e.g. Germany, will also seek to Leave.  But, (B) might not actually work, nor would it be necessary, because the penalties Britain is suffering, simply by having voted to leave, are already staggering.

College Education
A post-high-school education is invariably about complexity.  Many of the information, attitudes and beliefs that kids in high school need to be taught, are significantly more complex than they used to be a few decades ago (but not so much more complex as some baffled adults believe).  So some high-school teachers --perhaps because they themselves were taught an oversimplified version of the facts-- tend to deliver an oversimplified version of the facts: historical, political, or scientific, to their students.  So in the face of this systematic dumbing down of the information conveyed to students at every level, half the population is accustomed to resisting any sort of complexity.  (Some readers will not allow that last sentence to register unless it is italicized.  So: half the population is accustomed to resisting any sort of complexity.)

The hordes of Brits who blithely voted to Leave the EU did so with only the vaguest idea as to what the EU was, and what the other issues were: the economic repercussions, and the impacts to the standard of living of Brits of various economic classes.  Why would Brits live in ignorance of what exactly the EU was?  Resistance to complexity.  If you want to live far from any sort of complexity, good luck; that's all I can say.

Certain populist politicians in Britain, and certain populist politicians in the USA actively encourage this predilection for shunning complexity, and embracing habitual, and prejudiced patterns of thinking, established in their youth, from beliefs absorbed during grade-school days.  Schoolboy prejudices are not a robust basis for making decisions in adult life, in the environment of Britain, a signatory to the European Union.  That's a complex world, and needs cautious and informed decisions.  That's not what we saw on Wednesday.

In the USA, citizens of all levels of sophistication are faced with electing representatives in a set of circumstances that the word complex is barely competent to describe.
(1) Because of the resistance of large corporations to forgo the economic lubrication of low-cost, fossil-fuel generated energy, the temperatures are truly rising throughout the globe.
(2) Because the tax structure has been altered over the last few decades to favor the accumulation of wealth and resources by the wealthiest individuals in the land, extreme poverty is running rampant.
(3) There are difficult decisions to be made to deal with the steady flow of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border.  This is a complex issue, that has a lot to do with social justice at a trans-national level.

Concerning the last problem, on the face of it, we elect representatives to represent us: those of us of the electorate.  But these representatives are also charged with ultimately speaking to the welfare of people in other countries as well, on our behalf.  This looks like a conflict of interests, but for example, many of us are also concerned with the welfare of young children of illegal immigrants.  Though it may appear that elected representatives need not act in the interest of foreign nationals, Making good  and humane decisions about them (on our behalf) requires a broad education in a variety of disciplines, an intellectual background that many eager young bloods who enter the political arena do not have.

To many of these issues, Donald Trump has simple answers, based on the prejudices of the most ignorant, back-country illiterates.  At one time, I thought that Trump put these thoughts forward cynically, in order to appeal to voters of that description.  But it becomes increasingly clear that this is how Trump actually thinks.  He has become the poster boy for those who shun complexity.  Recently visiting Scotland, he did not realize that Scots had voted overwhelmingly to Remain.  Trump blithely announced to the Scottish audience, "Your people have taken your country back, which is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing."  The few dazed Scots who had gathered to endure Trump's blathering had simply blinked, while the majority of Scots had watched over Television.  The response was immediately and stunned.  They called Trump various colorful Scottish terms for blithering idiot.

One thing a candidate for President of the USA must have is a competent team to supply him or her with reliable facts.  Trump, shooting from an unreliable hip, antagonized at least 60% of Scots, without having the facts on call, and revealed to the World his foolishness.  When John Kennedy declared in Berlin that he was a doughnut, it might have been a joke.  But in the case of Donald Trump's casual remarks at his golf course, it was very clear that it was no joke.  (Trump's jokes are very obvious; this was not one of them.)

A word about complexity.  Simply shunning complexity doesn't get you anywhere.  There are ways to deal with it; from creative language, to using complex data structures (a concept from computer science), to divide-and-conquer strategies, to study groups --I know; it sounds like a silly idea, but it works sometimes-- complexity can be dealt with successfully.  But trying the Gordian Knot approach to complexity is as bad an idea as invading Iraq to grab some oil.

Well, after that fiasco of last week, I really did not expect to hear a lot of coherent thinking by British commentators for the next few days, and I have not been disappointed.

One line of thinking I have read in many places is that the BREXIT referendum is not binding.  Anthony Hilton says in the Evening Standard that unless an Act is passed in Parliament to leave the EU, Britain does not have to leave.  Well, the Brits are too upset (to put it mildly) to listen to anything that pretends to be wisdom from abroad, but let's face it: you cannot really have what Anthony Hilton calls an advisory referendum.  That's a joke.  Now you know that the population wants to leave the EU, but, no, you won't do it?  That's the worst kind of high handedness, and it would emphasize what the British government seems to be doing increasingly effectively, that is, telling the populace that it (the population) has absolutely no say in how the country is run, vote or no vote.  Most populations feel that way, but we have, for some reason, expected the Brits to do better.  It appears that the Germans run their country a lot better than the Brits have been doing for a long time.  We looked up to the Canadians as a government to admire, but until Justin Trudeau showed up, the Canadians were not doing so well.  As far as the British Parliament is concerned, it seems to be all style, and little substance that we can admire.

At any rate, the British Parliament is successfully destroying all the credibility it had left, and amateur political philosophers are helping it to find the most destructive path to take.  (I don't know much about Anthony Hilton to be prejudiced by it, but his suggestion that the Referendum should be ignored seems very foolish.)

Apparently the so-called Brexiteers (a term invented by Hilton) seem to cut across party lines.  Labor Brexiteers are pissed off at Jeremy Corbyn, one of the sanest voices in British politics I have heard in a long time, for being a Remainer.  Even David Cameron (surprisingly also a Remainer) has been eloquent about his attitude towards the situation.  Either he's a terrible liar, or in at least some areas he supports things that we approve of.

In addition to the usual vices of chauvinism and xenophobia, the Brexiteers seem to be oblivious as to the real source of their problems.  One does not expect such confusion from members of the Labour Party (though it's true that British Labour has been very confused ever since Tony Blair showed them how to be capitalists in disguise).  Only a Brit is truly qualified to comment on exactly how Britain has been mismanaged in recent times, but the usual suspects are always Big Business, Big Media, and Big Corruption.  From the outside, we have gotten accustomed to thinking of the EU (with Britain in it) as being a progressive force.  But we don't really know.

For those needing cheering up, here is a funny episode of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight addressing the BREXIT fallout.

Arch, needing feeling very sorry for our British friends.  You know you guys can come crash at my pad.