The Water in Which we Swim
How’s the Water?
David Foster Wallace gave one of the most celebrated commencement speeches to a college graduating class. His parable of the fish became the “How’s the water” meme shown above.
Wallace’s point was that the most obvious and important realities are the hardest to see and talk about. We live in bubbles, mostly seeing the same people, visiting familiar places and reading curated news. We take this environment for granted and rarely question it.
Wallace made a second point about the purpose of a liberal arts education. Contrary to popular belief this is not to teach people to think, but what to think about. His message was to consider the water in which we swim and why people hold certain views.
Nearly thirty years on this gentle entreaty to be less arrogant about the beliefs we hold has been usurped. The water in which we swim is now the effort others make to shape our environment. This is what goes on behind the scenes to have us read, buy or think something and to do it now.
It doesn’t make something wrong or fake because we’re being directed to do it, but once in a while we must stop and ask why this and why now. The water in which we swim is increasingly polarised.
Be Different not Better
In business, if you want to disrupt an incumbent you must be different rather than better. Faster and cheap are better but deliver the same outcome for customers. Even if you convince them it’s worth the effort to change, the competition responds.
If you are cheaper then the incumbent cuts prices and if you are faster they speed up. You start a race to the bottom, increasing costs and neither side wins. The newer, smaller company generally loses.
As a result most companies don’t focus on better. Neither do politicians.
Consider Red Bull. It is made from water, caffeine and sugar, much the same as Coke. But where Pepsi created the taste challenge, Red Bull did something different.
At the time of Red Bull’s launch Coke was promoted as “Always Coca-Cola”. Rather than refreshing and tasty, Red Bull went medicinal in terms of taste and serving size. A new craze was born.
How to become a politician
To kickstart a political career you must be different. You must find an issue that excites and motivates people to the extent that it overwhelms the mainstream debate. Why does this work?
There are fewer votes in the centre ground of politics than in the past. The last time we were this divided was the 1930s, which was before the previous Fourth Turning. Whether you believe the doomsday theories or not, they are observations that previous periods of political polarisation have ended with violence. This can be domestic, but is most often international.
As an upstart politician you must be authentic. You must believe in something and it must be big enough that sufficient numbers of people will care. You cannot win a national election arguing for upgrades to the ring road in Doncaster, but you might win one talking for or against climate change policies.
Next you must speak persuasively on your topic. The best politicians have natural charisma, which is famously the case with Bill Clinton. Speaking without notes is a must, which is easy if you believe and stick with one core idea.
There are norms with which to comply. You should dress conventionally while behaving radically. If you turn up everywhere in hemp clothing you’ve taken authenticity too far. Thereafter, there are a few strategies that work well to persuade people.
Firstly you find an enemy. The two most popular today are the shadowy cabal that secretly controls everything and the evil foreign power. If you can blend the two then so much the better.
The evil foreign power that is secretly controlling our elections is a gift that keeps giving. It plays well where nationalism lies close to the surface. Make America Great Again is a slogan to paint Trump’s opponents as un-American.
The response is on the same nationalistic lines. Trump is in cahoots with Putin. As the tit-for-tat continues, Biden is accused of using influence with Ukraine to protect his son’s commercial interests.
Closer to home, the Scots still suffer under the yoke of English rule.
Armed with an enemy, a politician needs numbers to support their argument. These need not be facts in the strictest sense, because by the time anyone checks you’ll have gone, but you need to create an air of authority. The money to be redirected to the NHS after Brexit is still a sore point for many, although the victors have long moved on.
Finally you need a plan. It works especially well to be open about yours if you’ve painted the enemy as conniving in secret. You don’t need your policies to be practical or even implemented, but they must be big, bold and bite-sized. Build a wall to keep out migrants.
Why Here, Why Now
Now you have a cause, an enemy and a plan, and are presentable and charismatic, all that’s left is a megaphone. In first past the post electoral systems such as the US and UK, this means attaching yourself to one of the two main parties. Trump took over the Republican party to get access to its money and infrastructure.
The loudest megaphone is the media, which must be complicit in your strategy. Why the owners of news outlets support divisive narratives today more than yesterday is at the heart of The Sniff Test. The list of possible explanations is long and includes wealth disparities, inflation, new technologies and political cycles. All play a part without being sufficient explanation alone.
How to run a political media campaign
Media is about rotating between a handful of topics you are comfortable with and grabbing attention. The two best ways to do this are with rage and by mirroring.
Step One: Grab Attention
To generate rage you say something to anger readers. To mirror them you make them nod in agreement. Top ten global news sites combine both. The headline in the Mail Online today reads:
Now it’s ordinary women like us who are being CANCELLED by the trans lobby!
Step Two: Guilt by Association
Once you’ve grabbed attention you must reinforce your message. You cannot tell people what to think, but you can nudge them. The most influential writing is that which guides readers to make connections.
A prime means to do this is by association. You are not saying one thing causes another when you tell people this happened as this happened. You don’t need to because if you repeat the message enough, people will jump to your conclusion.
The first line of the top business story in The Telegraph this morning reads.
The pound has slumped to its lowest level since March as markets prepare for a knife edge decision by the Bank of England on interest rates.
The pound did not fall because of the impending Bank of England decision on interest rates, but as it approached. The reader joins the dots connected by the word as. Yet if a decision were truly knife edge, then might traders wait for the outcome before buying or selling? Financial markets move around for all manner of reasons, but if you are a market reporter you better have an explanation for everything.
But this is not the nudge. The Telegraph has issues with the Bank of England raising interest rates too far. On September 13 it ran this headline:
Bank of England risks interest rates ‘overdose’ as economy shrinks
We were told the Bank has also lost the country billions on August 22:
Government makes biggest payment to Bank of England in history to fund bond losses
The connections for you to make from today’s story are that the Bank of England is hurting you by pushing down the value of the pound, and that this is another in the litany of the Bank’s errors. There’s a library of editorial content explaining why the Bank does a bad job, but you nod along with those commentaries only after reading the stories associating the Bank with financial problems.
Once you see this here, you’ll notice it everywhere. My daily summary of market moving stories from Bloomberg had this headline recently. Where do you think the voice of mainstream finance stands on the issue of cryptocurrencies?
A ‘crypto rabbit hole’ that leads to human trafficking.
As few people understand financial markets but everyone cares about the money in their pocket, business headlines are a great way to influence people. But this is just the start.
Step Three: Quote an Expert
The rise of unnamed experts is a curse of the attention economy. Can you spot the nudge in this story from The Guardian?
These people aren’t run-of-the-mill experts, they’re respiratory experts. Their paper is peer-reviewed, most probably by a like-minded selection of academics in a compliant journal such as Nature. Yet the real message is that the climate emergency, which is no longer just climate change or a climate crisis, is irreversible.
Step Four: Use Vivid Language
Away from the front pages, where a pretence of neutrality is maintained by nudging rather than saying outright, it’s okay to be one-sided. Here’s the Irish Examiner on beachcombing:
We can all agree that volunteers cleaning beaches are praise worthy. But the second paragraph of this story talks about the war in Ukraine and how devastating it would be if “home turf was similarly destroyed”. I confess I do not see how picking up crisp wrappers will stop this happening, but thank goodness it does.
Politicians may wax lyrical away from headline issues where authority and facts are most important. It is necessary to have a stock of background issues to cycle through, to keep you and them in the public conscious. You may pump up the vivid imagery when talking to these.
Who is holding these young people back? No need to say because by positioning a Labour government as the answer, we make the connection to the Conservative government as the cause. What is the class ceiling? No matter, because it exists up and down the country, blame London, and is associated with everyone who votes Tory.
Step Five: Change Government Policy
If you are a political entrepreneur then your policies must be memorable, but need not be implemented. When things don’t work out you can hark back to your enemies who rejected your proposal. A policy that never was is most useful because it is never proved wrong.
If you are pressure group, however, you need legislation to be passed while your topic is in the limelight. If nothing happens, then your issue is replaced by something new. Try and get the Prime Minister on side.
Nowhere is this more pressing than climate policy. This is the bitter fight of the decade and the outcome will be determined by the rules the government puts in place. Governments tend towards more regulations because this means more fines and taxes, but there are limits.
The other side of the aisle is on the defensive and cannot be associated with policies that hurt ordinary people. They report what’s happening along with a reminder that this is contentious and the nudge that this change of heart is a twist in the road that does not alter the destination.
Always Test the Water
First past the post elections have always engendered adversarial politics. They have also persisted where more consensual systems come and go. The switching back and forth between parties is a release of the pressure valve that keeps us circulating around the middle.
At times the distance from the centre increases as the forces pulling us apart grow stronger. We are in such a time now. Politicians and the media are opportunists riding this trend, rather than its cause.
The goal of The Sniff Test is to highlight these trends and the narratives and practices that exacerbate them. I have my own views, beliefs and values. The important thing is to remain true to my values which define me, to regularly review my beliefs, and to question my views.
We must stop and ask ourselves ‘what is it making us think this way here and now’. Is it our true beliefs and values, or the water in which we swim.
It was very cooperative and timely of Rishi Sunak to provide the perfect conclusion to this excellent piece
The 'secret cabal controlling the word' occupies one side of the political debate, particularly in the West because there is an element of truth to it. The observable quality (intellectually and visionary) of the modern front bench politician is such that they simply do not have the capacity to run a bath, let alone a country which means the armies of civil servants, advisers and think tanks are the main drivers of policy whilst the House of Commons feeds the illusion of politics (better explained by the late John Nettleton and Nigel Hawthorne in Yes Minister https://youtu.be/-pQcNKFoIDE?si=CFJehvX0wHq5uGfW)
So the reasonable suspicion is the undisclosed source of funding of these behind the scenes operations of government that pull the puppet strings?
No one would ever talk of a secret cabal controlling the late Margaret Thatcher, and the case can certainly be made of that era of a much higher standard of politician on both sides of the political divide half a century ago evidenced not least by the fact that two of the most unlikely friendships of that era (Enoch Powell and Michael Foot and Margaret Thatcher and Eric Heffer) would be unthinkable in today's theatre of tribal politics when there really isn't much to choose between the main parties (the uniparty effect)
But Thatcher like Heffer, Powell like Foot were influenced by their experiences and extensive reading and found advice in like minded people who were as much behind the scenes as the modern think tank The difference is they were arguably more worldly wise than the modern, straight out of university think tank researcher
Life is after all a game of chance though greater disclosure and transparency from those in authority would help people make better decisions When it emerged that Sadiq Khan not only lied about the rationale behind the ULEZ expansion, but used taxpayers money to suppress a significant scientific counter narrative to his ICL evidence, people justifiably become angry !
What else are they hiding ? Why is he doing this ? Who does he work for ?
This has resulted in a London wide civil backlash against, not just ULEZ, but also the Mayor and Labour Party who the public consider are the owners of this.
Seeing this backlash against net zero, is this why the Green blob were sent into meltdown by firstly Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak ? The consequence thus, unintended or otherwise, is a bubble has been burst and a broad spectrum of the public can see who is on whose side which I would say changes the dynamic of the next election considerably (interesting article by Ben Pile about this https://x.com/clim8resistance/status/1704667957350076672?s=46)
This civil unrest is widespread and growing across the West Fourth Turning ? Perhaps as I doubt the momentum stops without further concessions by government and local authorities
But we will see