Alternative Editorial: Understanding Our Choices
Have you ever watched a game of football without taking sides? Even when you have no prior attachment or loyalties, it's hard not to warm towards one team in the course of the game and start to see the other as the opponent - standing between you and victory. Only those who actively dislike football can remain aloof.
With the exception of those who have a long history of winning because there is only one top team in the league (eg Celtic/Bayern Munich), games are always fraught, because winning matters. So much so that fans, at the local, national and international level, spend millions every year, investing in an outcome that cannot be guaranteed.
For the vast majority, losing better each year is as much as they can hope for - yet that's enough to keep them hooked. As Liverpool manager Bill Shankly famously said “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
On the surface, sports competition is very different from political opposition. Voting for one party or one side of a debate is not justified by local origin (town or nation) but ideology. In the UK, those on the left believe themselves to have different values than those on the right, even as both sides often occupy the same geographical location.
Yet who can deny that identity plays a part? For much of the 20th Century the Left associated itself with the working class, although this past decade the 'red wall' has been breached.
While sports is a competition of skills - with the supporting resources always accumulating at the top of the game - politics presents itself as a battle between right and wrong. Voters believe that the choice they are making is moral and intelligent. Nevertheless the tendency towards binary competition suggests that they have emotional dynamics in common with sport. Even in proportional systems, each party 'others' the rest. Each misrepresents the complex positions of even those ideologically close in order to score points, rarely engaging thoughtfully.
Choosing sides is not the same as choosing life
So it's no surprise to find citizens caught in an excruciating divide between 'two sides' in the current war in the Middle East. All over Europe the dilemma of choosing between supporting Israel and the Palestinian people has caused rupture in communities—all the way down to families disagreeing along intellectual, psychological or generational lines.
The divide is passionate as both 'sides' have strong historic and traumatic rationales. Not only have both sides suffered immeasurably over time, but their supporters, too, are identifying with the dynamic their conflict represents and lining up accordingly. One side sees mostly the suffering of a people singled out for unique punishment. The other sees the suffering of those who are overlooked, paying the price for a conflict they are not directly implied in.
Yet they have common ancestry by virtue of their geographical location and the history of indigeneity. The Middle East in that sense can be seen as a family dynamic, playing out the tragic consequences of feuding siblings, each with their groups of friends only making things worse.
When we humans see ourselves - in each part of the world - so deeply divided over a catastrophic situation, it's remarkable that we don't call ourselves out as flawed. Why can't we see the limitation of our own viewpoint when so many of our close friends disagree with us? We don't mean this as a prompt to 'give in to the other' but to call out the divide itself. Surely it is deluded in some way, and we have all fallen prey?
Some will say it's human to fight: diversity generates conflict and drives evolution - Musk holds this position, in a recent interview). However, when conflict becomes violent, something else is in play. How many of us would kill another person over a difference of opinion - even when that opinion implies the broaching of rights and dignities?
On examination, we probably know what proportion of our friends would react to humiliation and oppression with violence. Given that we put people in prison for that inability to restrain ourselves, the numbers are probably low.
And at this point in history, that number is only decreasing all the time. Partly because of social development and the state monopoly of violence (as Stephen Pinker describes in The Better Angels of Our Nature). But also because we are living in a more feminised society, with the tools for self-awareness, dialogue and deliberation more available than in any time in history.
How we betray ourselves
Of course, the history of war the world over has shaped our expectation of conflict becoming violent, obliging us to take part. But are we betraying ourselves when we comply with that expectation? When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, some of us were surprised that otherwise peaceful men in other parts of Europe suddenly imagined themselves ready to fight and potentially defend their own countries. What tale of heroism and agency were they responding to?
How deep is the emotional chord struck, that citizens would suddenly rise to the call to kill people they do not know? Almost always to defend others' rights not to be treated in that way themselves - to be killed without fault. It's an historic and cultural double-bind that we have to be able to reckon with now.
While President Zelensky has done a heroic job of protecting the freedom of Ukraine in the face of the war crimes of Putin, increasing numbers of young men all over the region - including Russia - don't want to participate. Even given the truth of the danger their country is in, still they are choosing against the opportunity to kill the 'other'. Is that because they cannot believe in their fighting cause? Or is it because they can't believe in violence as a remedy? And value their own lives and those of their families above the call to war?
The duality has not disappeared—they are still making a choice for something and against the opposite, but it is not a choice between one group's right to live over another's. It is the choice between the right to violence over the right to peace: a choice between life and death itself - for all the people, on both sides.
Of course, that choice is not obvious to everyone. Well before we find the space in our lives to consider the deeper aspects of the choices we are making, we are being manipulated hour by hour to keep the status quo going. Not through persuasion - the making of a case that appeals to your reason. But through emotional manipulation of our deepest drives.
Andrew Simms latest book BADvertising explains how the worst polluters and energy consuming businesses have inserted themselves deep into the places where we gather for conviviality and meaning - such as national sports events or arts festivals.
Take a look at all our 'given' emotional needs - status, belonging, attention, sense of achievement, connection, intimacy, privacy - and you'll see the playbook of consumer advertising. Buy a handbag, choose this brand of coffee, drive this car and you will be emotionally fulfilled.
Most egregious maybe are the adverts for joining the army: which young man (and some women) could fully resist the call of the globe, the chance to get trained while scuba-diving and the promise of authority over others? Add to that the lure of a noble mission.
More recently the ads have come to shame young people for their social media lifestyles - the apotheosis of our growth economy - and offer themselves as a solution.
Never once have those adverts pointed at the real outcome for hundreds of thousands of young men (and some women), whose lives are ruined by injury, trauma and guilt about the destruction they have wreaked upon overseas towns and villages, with little or no gain for the people they imagined saving.
How can we restore our ability to choose properly? Not between groups of people, all of whom have suffered similar manipulation by leaders, themselves deluded about the efficacy of their violence. But between the past and the future: between an old world which led to these multiple crises of environment, social injustice and war. And a new world of possibility, through participation and shared response-ability.
For that we need time and space - the two things we lost through modernity, capitalism or the internet: choose your culprit (they overlap). Only when we pay attention to real relationship with each other - understanding each other’s needs and gifts - can we begin to take ownership of the future again. Not to reach agreements about everything across the board, but to create safe spaces for disagreement, challenges, transformational moments. Without violence.
