We live in a world and in societies that are hugely unfair.
Everyone knows that, yet no-one seems to care.
It makes me angry, absolutely livid1 in fact, but how about you? Are you angry or are you just going to suck it up?
Divided We Stand, United We Fall or Why U No Mad As Hell For Ducks Sack is my attempt to convince you to get mad about the unfairness.
If at any time I come across as patronising, I really am sorry, but I’m writing this book for the young me. When I look back through my life and the many people I’ve met, most have been very much like the younger me. A bit too quick to accept what we’re told. A bit too easy to manipulate.
I am the man who struggles to count basketball passes, maybe you struggle with it too. Take a minute and 21 seconds right now and see if you can manage to correctly count how many times the team in white tops pass the basketball – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.2
Granted, not everyone I’ve met has been like the young me though.
Even after a couple of decades, Mrs Forclift still astonishes me with her ability to think creatively and solve problems that would leave me a crumpled heap on the floor.
And in my early thirties, I knew a couple of 21-year-olds who both astounded me.
One of them was so smart and assured, despite me having had 10 or so years more to learn about the world and gain my smarts, in their presence I felt like our ages were reversed.
The other one astounded me by being completely unselfconscious about picking their nose to the point that in most conversations they seemed more interested in what was on the tip of their index finger than what I was saying.
Of those two, one went on to become a household name in the UK, while the other…well, I don’t know, probably went on to have a nosebleed.
Anyway, if you’re more like Mrs Forclift or the first 21-year-old, please accept my apologies in advance for every time you feel me figuratively patting you on the head in a patronising way. In my mind, I’m talking to the nose-picker, much the same as the younger me.
Now, we’ve already seen that we’ve literally evolved to make it easy for the most powerful to walk all over us and as we go, I’ll introduce some of the psychological mechanisms that affect our decision making.
That’s not our main focus though and the reality is that there will be many, many more mechanisms that affect how both of us behave than I’ll touch on. Most of them could probably be traced back some 50 million years to a time when our ape ancestors had relatively basic consciousness and self-awareness. I don’t want to get too caught up with these though, as that’s not what this book is really about. If human psychology is a subject that interests you, you’ll find plenty of books and websites devoted to that and, if you’re anything like me, it will be a huge rabbit hole to fall down.
I won’t be bringing up the emperor’s new clothes later, but the actions described by Hans Christian Anderson in his fairytale are fiendishly effective in real life. I’ve seen it used many a time, particularly by sellers of information products and I always think it’s a surefire giveaway of when they’re selling a product they don’t think is worth the price. The sales pitch will end with the warning that this isn’t a “do this, then this and finally this” kind of product and the information will only be useful to those who are smart enough to read between the lines and mine it for the real gems of genius that are buried in the lessons.
It’s super effective because most who buy it will convince themselves that they have understood all of the highly valuable lessons included because no-one likes to think they’ve wasted their money. Even the few who may be left scratching their heads will be reluctant to ask for a refund because that’s just admitting that they’re too stupid to understand the valuable information that’s been shared with them.
Much the same technique is used by conspiracy theorists who will defend their views against those who point out the obvious flaws in their arguments by insisting that the doubters just aren’t smart enough to understand or don’t have the special vision required to see through the lies being told to us.
Most conspiracy theories work because they make for compelling stories, but the intelligence angle is an effective way to bring people on board too.
Group polarisation3 can elevate a good theory to a whole new level. It’s also known as risky shift and it describes how as individuals we may hold a moderate belief, but once we’re in a group of others who share that belief, all of us tend to escalate our belief to a more extreme point, and it occurs in both negative and positive directions.
So, a Democrat voter before the 2020 US presidential election could have thought Joe Biden was a little too old to be the candidate, but after spending time with others who share the same view, the whole group could be convinced he’d going to keel over of old age at any moment.
Or we could find a Facebook group called QAnon Sceptics, where most members join not feeling convinced by the idea, but believing there’s no smoke without fire, so there must be at least a grain of truth in it. As the group members rub against each other, that feeling that there’s some truth to it will escalate for many of the members turning them into total believers of the whole QAnon story.
These and the many other psychological mechanisms would have been convenient shortcuts to decision-making that would have given our ancestors the best chance of survival when needing to make life-and-death decisions in a single moment.
They didn’t enjoy the luxury of time that so many of us do now. Life was simply finding enough food to survive while expending as little energy as possible in the process, with the occasional bit of jiggy-jiggy to persist their genes after they passed away peacefully in the high branch of an ancient tree or became a snack for a Sabre Tooth Tiger with the munchies after eating some leaves from that odd-looking plant.
We’re different to them. On one level we’re much, much more advanced, yet because we’re still wired the same way, we can be just as backward as them at the same time. But we get to choose whether we live like our ancestors or as rational human beings who have developed to a higher level.
Here’s the thing, though. Most of us choose to live like our ancestors because it’s easier.
And the powerful who live their lives at the top of our societies know this and use it to their advantage.
How else could we and generation after generation before us be manipulated into accepting that just a few people in society should have most of the wealth while many of us struggle to cover all of our bills month to month and the poorest can’t even put food on the table for their children three times a day?
How else could the powerful and wealthy divide us into opposing political camps that see the other side as the enemy, even when the party we commit to does no more to build a better society for us than the opposing party that we’re taught to hate and not trust?
How else could so many generations of our ancestors have convinced themselves that they needed to fight in squalor and sacrifice their lives in wars started by those at the top of society to bring them victory and glory, even though they took all the wealth before the war and continued to take all the wealth after the war?
Our ancient ancestors were animals.
They had no choice in how they behaved.
We don’t have to behave like animals, though many of us do.
How about you? Do you have the control and intelligence to think for yourself and behave as a free human being?
Or are you just another one of the pack being played and manipulated by the powerful to give them the life they want?
Not the life you want.
We are bigger suckers than we want to admit.
Charles M. Schwab was a steel magnate who made and spent about $800 million in today’s money living the high life before dying broke. Apparently, he even broke the bank at Monte Carlo once, so no doubt betting big in casinos played a significant part in his waste of money. Anyway, one day while passing through one of his factories, he noticed several of his workers smoking under a no-smoking sign. Rather than drop on them like a ton of bricks, he walked up to them, gave each one a cigar and told them that he’d appreciate it if they smoked them outside.
How about that, I bet that made their day, or perhaps their month. That little gesture likely gained a lifetime’s goodwill from those men and that story of how he treated his staff with respect will have spread throughout his workforce. Huge reward for a one-off investment of a few cigars.
Every single day he bought the working hours of those men as cheaply as possible and sold them for as much as possible. He used their hard work to generate almost a billion dollars for his own benefit.
A great boss would work out how much their staff needed to earn and pay them that in order to earn their respect and loyalty. However, a small one-off gesture is much cheaper, but could have almost as great an effect because of the way that we’re wired.
Even the story of beating a casino will have worked for him in this way as it feels to most of us that it’s a case of the little guy beating the system. Even though that little guy wasted almost a billion dollars which could have been so much better used helping his workers to enjoy better lives.
We fall for it from business people and we fall for it from politicians too.
Whether we tend to vote for left-leaning or right-leaning parties, does it really ever make a difference to us? A real difference, that is.
So they’ll cut our tax by X%. Sounds great, but when that’s turned into a real amount of money each week, will we even notice it? Is it really going to make any difference or will we still end the month hoping the next wage slip arrives before our bank balance hits zero?
Or they tell us they’re going to champion business and grow the economy. If we’re unemployed that might make a dramatic difference, but otherwise are we really going to feel the benefits of a booming economy? Just 1% for a billionaire is 10 million spondoolix, but if you’ve got 1,000 spondoolix, it’s just a 10 spondoolix note. Big deal.
Many of us spend our whole lives championing one political party or perhaps two as it’s not unusual for people to lean left when young and move to the right when they grow older. Regardless, at any one time, we’re firmly focused on the benefits that one party is promising and we delight and celebrate their victories so enthusiastically, we completely miss the fact that things have barely changed for us.
So an income tax cut will save us 600 spondoolix a year. That’s not even 12 spondoolix a week, it’ll disappear in coffee and donuts without us even realising, while the great politician we love and who swears they really care about us spends their time making their wealthy friends wealthier in much more significant ways.
What’s the point in a politician promising to make our country the greatest in the history of the universe if they’re just going to hand all the new wealth that creates to those at the top of society who are already wealthy beyond belief?
That’s what happens though, every time. It always has been and, unless you and your peers stop sitting on your hands, always will be.
There hasn’t been a politician in the history of the world who still cared about the people they served after just a few years of having power. If there had been, there wouldn’t be such a big gap between those at the bottom of society and the wealthy at the top.
We can tell ourselves the politicians we vote for care about us if it helps, but we’re just two more suckers if we do, and politicians and the wealthy love suckers.
Suckers give them everything on a plate.
That’s why throughout this book you will find various footnotes. Often they may just be a link to a song or video I was reminded of as I wrote, but mostly they’re offering the source of supporting information. Evidence that you can check to assess whether my claim on this or that should be trusted. Of course, there may be other sources offering information that runs counter to what I say. It’s your job to decide who or what to believe.
What I want to do though is help you to build up a mental habit. A habit to question and fact-check what others tell you. So that every time you hear someone make a bold claim, you’re instinctively looking for the “footnotes”, the proof that supports that claim, rather than thinking “I want that to be true, so I’m just going to accept that it is.” Oh, a quick usability tip, if you’re reading the online or an ebook version, if you click the linked number to jump to a footnote, you can click the small arrow right at the end of the footnote to jump back to the point in the text that you were reading.
N.B.
Before we press on, since finishing this book, various things have changed. You’ll see me mention the upcoming 2024 US Presidential election between Trump and Biden, even though the latter has now dropped out in favour of Kamala Harris.
And having dedicated most of my time attacking the Conservative Party when considering British politics, we now have a Labour government. They would be just as ripe for attack, as shown by the decision by their lacking leader Keir Starmer to suspend seven of his own MPs who voted against their party in a vote on scrapping the cap on benefits for more than two children.4 Starmer won that vote overwhelmingly by 363 votes to 103, yet still feels the need to clamp down on the free speech of his fellow MPs, despite their duty to serve their constituents’ best interests, not their party’s. Not to mention supporting a law that punishes poor children with no voice or political rights, rather than asking the wealthiest to give a bit more to support their own society.
I could have gone back and edited aspects and added new arguments and examples, but the world is changing daily and we could end up with a book that’s never finished as a result.
So, I’ve left some things that are already out of date on a factual level, but that doesn’t change the message I’m trying to get across.
For example, the US election is now a contest between an old man and a younger woman, but they’re both representing the same political parties that have helped the wealthy to suck up almost all the wealth for centuries, while leaving a miserly token amount for the majority of Americans.
That hasn’t changed before and I don’t believe for one second it’s going to change now regardless of who the candidates are. The parties and policies will remain largely constant.
- https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6bbb2l ↩︎
- Did you watch the video and count the passes? If not, go on, go and do it now. Right, did you see it? Apparently, half the people who view the video don’t see it. I didn’t, so I can only imagine how crazy that must sound to the half who did see it. If you were like me, don’t feel too bad, it may indicate that you have a greater ability to concentrate and focus more effectively on tasks without being distracted by shiny objects. If you’re interested, here’s a short article from one of the creators of that video who describes another test where 65% of participants missed something going on in front of them – https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/but-did-you-see-the-gorilla-the-problem-with-inattentional-blindness-17339778/ ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization ↩︎
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c978m6z3egno ↩︎