In ticking off teenager, Macron was right about need for respect

The video’s gone viral but in ticking off a teenager, the French President did more than simply assert his own importance.

A still from the video shows French President Emmanuel Macron speaking to the teenager in Paris. Picture: TF1 via AP

The video has gone viral. President Emmanuel Macron is shaking hands with a crowd who have gathered to commemorate General de Gaulle’s call for the French to resist the Nazis in 1940. He is accosted by a cocky teenage boy who first sings a line from the left-wing anthem The Internationale, in an apparent dig at Macron’s pro-business policies, before asking cheekily, in the egalitarian spirit of our no-experts age: “How’s it going, Manu?”

Macron’s reaction is instant and emphatic. “No. You can’t do that. No, no, no, no.” The boy, looking stricken, apologises. Macron hasn’t finished. He knows he is speaking at a solemn site; one where hundreds of brave Resistance members were executed. “You’re here at an official ceremony, and you should behave. You can play the clown but today it’s the Marseillaise, the Chant des Partisans (the song of the Resistance), so you call me Mr President, or sir. OK? There you go. Good. You’ve got to do things the right way.”

The boy is uneasily, warily gripped. He is staring at the President but with defensively lowered eyes. Macron tells him, in essence, that he must work for the right to rebel. “Even if you want to lead a revolution one day, you’ve first got to earn a diploma and learn how to put food on the table, OK?”

Macron is explicitly making the case that hierarchies matter, that achievements must be recognised, that all opinions are not of equal worth. Liberte, egalite, fraternite do not imply that nobody deserves respect. They imply that it must be earned, and once earned, acknowledged. Macron posted the clip on his website, with the message that “respect is a minimum expectation in France”.

This emphasis on respect is unfashionable, especially here, especially from a politician. It is not of course the same thing as President Donald Trump’s chilling wish for the terrified obedience shown by the North Koreans to Kim Jong-un.

But it is unthinkable that Theresa May or David Cameron would have had such an exchange, and if they had, a storm of derision would have followed. Post the expenses scandal we have assumed a stance of scornful suspicion towards our representatives. They are expected to treat members of the public with deference, not the other way round. There was a brief moment last year, before the election, when the right-wing press treated May not with respect but with adulation, choosing for its own purposes to swoon over her as the Iron Lady; the voters’ sceptical verdict brought a rapid end to that.

France has a different tradition, not least because the president embodies the nation as the head of state. But Macron has drawn attention to the importance to all of us of being recognised and admired. None of us can afford to shrug that need aside.

One of the basic drivers of human behaviour is the quest for wealth and social status. That may bring its own rewards, in diamonds, cars or houses, but dozens of studies show that higher socioeconomic status has almost no effect on happiness. What really affects us is how we’re judged by colleagues, family and friends. Psychologists have a charmless word for this critical measurement; our sociometric status, or SMS.

In 2011 a group of US psychologists and business academics, led by Cameron Anderson at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted four different experiments with a total of almost a thousand participants to investigate this link in depth. The details differed but people were asked to rate themselves and the members of their groups on whether they were admired, included and liked.

They found that as our sociometric status rises, so does our sense of subjective wellbeing. We report more positive emotions, fewer negative ones, and greater satisfaction. We have more influence over others’ opinions, more autonomy and more control over group decisions. We have more friends and are asked to more social activities.

We don’t adapt to this status and then discount it, as happens when we get richer. Reputation and admiration give us continued pleasure and pride. When our status falls, as is likely to happen to any of us in a lifetime — perhaps because we change jobs or partners, reveal our pettiness, or betray our group’s codes — our sadness rises. The results hold true regardless of race, gender, wealth or extroversion.

Critically, the hierarchies whose judgments matter most to us are our local ones, not the ex-university classmates or online communities. It’s our standing in the face-to-face groups that affects us profoundly. “The respect one commands locally shapes how one feels globally,” the researchers conclude.

This is riveting and not, of course, uniformly positive. If the group whose codes we follow is criminal or anti-social the fierce pressure on its members won’t be ones we admire. They will nevertheless explain much about why we cling to the allegiances we’ve formed. Respect is too precious to throw away.

Macron is on a mission to convert voters to his values; to set the codes that frame their choice. At the end of the exchange, he tells the boy to get the best grade at school. Why try, the boy asks, when just a pass will do? Macron’s response is fierce. “Show what you’re capable of, go as far as you can! You can’t just be satisfied with the minimum. Those you came to honour today, they didn’t just aim for the minimum. If they had they would have stayed at home.”

Macron is clear on how, in his France, respect should be earned. But we’re in a global battle for values and the lesson from the research is that we’re so hardwired by our hunger for respect that it is group appeal, not individual persuasion, that is going to count.

The Times