However, whether you call it the zeitgeist or progress, whether you put it down to modern selfishness and soft living or to an improvement in humanity, it is undoubtedly a fact.
These new trends towards emoting first and thinking later (if at all) reach deep into our modern psyche. How often do you find yourself, or hear someone else, saying “I feel (this); I feel (that)”?
Expressing how we feel makes eminent sense if we’re sharing that we are happy or sad or angry or unwell. The problem is “I feel” now precedes statements that have nothing whatsoever to do with emotions. I feel that’s not the right decision for the company to make. I feel the accused is guilty. I feel like we need more food for all these people coming to dinner tonight. We now inject feelings into places they don’t belong. It’s our default brain reflecting a new zeitgeist. For some, it serves an added purpose: when you say you feel a certain way, it precludes debate. I don’t choose how I feel, so you can’t deny my feelings.
In contrast to these passive sensations, when you say you think something, you own a perspective; it’s one that can be debated.
In a few hundred years, evolutionary biologists and anthropologists will have more to say on the consequences to humans and human existence if this trend of feeling, rather than thinking, continues. All we can say right now is that our propensity towards emoting has many regrettable consequences and often has perverse results, frequently the opposite of what the emoters (to give them a name) have in mind. These include an unwillingness to confront reality, a preference for thinking that doesn’t require much depth, an addiction to slogans instead of analysis, and favouring short-term fixes over more durable solutions. When someone delivers a few hard facts, we recoil in horror.
Last week Huw Pill, the chief economist at the Bank of England, attracted nutty headlines for stating an incontrovertible fact. We needed to accept that we were poorer in a high inflation environment, he said. Speaking on Beyond Unprecedented: The Post-Pandemic Economy, a podcast series from Columbia Law School, Pill said when businesses tried to pass on energy prices to consumers, and when workers tried to pass on rising living costs by demanding higher wages, this game of pass-the-parcel could well lead to persistently higher inflation.
His observations are facts. Inflation makes us poorer. In Britain, where annual inflation is above 10 per cent, the pain is immense with a cost-of-living crisis in full swing.
Pill’s remarks should be taken seriously, not just in Britain but in Australia, too, where the headline inflation rate reached 7.8 per cent in December – the highest rate in more than three decades – before dropping to 7 per cent last quarter.
Instead, emoters had a field day, mocking Pill’s remarks as aloof and hurtful to those doing it tough. Pill is not a social worker or a therapist. He is an economist charged with managing the central bank’s core mission to bring inflation down to the 2 per cent target because inflation damages our lives. Facts don’t hurt. Only a dolt complains about the facts.
The next day, ABC host Thomas Oriti joined the mockers, asking: what does that man earn? How is targeting Pill personally relevant to the facts? Would his critics pay more attention if he earned the same as them? If so, that’s another pointer to how emotional responses trump reasoned ones these days.
Instead of offering basic analysis, Oriti quipped that Pill’s words fell about as flat as Malcolm Fraser’s phrase that life wasn’t meant to be easy. Tittering ensued.
A little bit of history would have been preferable. Fraser’s remarks related to another period of high inflation. It was a seven-word quip in a 7000-word speech, the fifth Alfred Deakin Lecture given in July 1971. Though the circumstances differed, Fraser then – like Pill last week – warned against price and wage inflation. Fraser warned that throughout history, when nations have confronted challenges, “whether they survive or whether they fall to the wayside depends on the manner and character of their response”.
The character of our response to current challenges does not look promising. And the reason is we would rather emote than think.
We know from experience that allowing wage rises to match inflation usually just ensures inflation lasts longer, rises further and hurts more people than if workers accept a short period where inflation outstrips wage growth. But still unions will demand pay rises.
Similarly, the refusal to accept even a cap on National Disability Insurance Scheme growth will make the program unsustainable: either benefits will have to be cut harder when reality hits, or else other areas of expenditure will suffer – schools and hospitals, for example. Or taxes will rise, hurting people, too.
The push to regulate the size and frequency of rent increases is another potentially disastrous short-term fix. It will likely mean fewer investors will develop new housing or improve existing housing, leading to a greater shortage of suitable rental accommodation.
In each case, feelings get in the way of sound policy. ACT Disability Minister Emma Davidson slammed the federal government’s plan to rein in the growth of the NDIS as “heartbreaking”. In other words, how would you feel if you had a disabled child and needed the NDIS?
Advocates, activists and politicians of all stripes regularly tap into feelings. Guilt, like other feelings, is visceral and immediate. Thinking is harder, and slower. It requires effort.
However, the two need not be mutually exclusive: we can be compassionate, even feel shame, about a situation that needs fixing and simultaneously devise a reasoned, factually solid response.
But when guilt or other feelings override careful analysis, then a poor policy response is almost guaranteed. In short, guilt alone is a dreadful reason to support a policy.
The great irony of emoters demanding more and more spending is their obsession with environmental sustainability doesn’t carry over to financial sustainability. Natural resources are finite, they point out. Yet they seem to believe financial resources are infinite. Just as night follows day, that dream will become a nightmare.
More Coverage
US leaves crackpot UNESCO
Trump right to dump American membership.
Understated probe misses mark
The Greatest Race Debate all but ignored dangers of anti-Semitism.
A key feature of modern life is that in many parts of public policy and discourse it has become permissible to prioritise emotion over reason. Not so long ago this would have been considered soppy romanticism, and the hard heads occupying our highest offices would have recoiled at the thought of emotion driving policy.