There are many things in the world that the vast, vast majority of people believe in, and despite this, are completely untrue. Oh, I’m not talking about the nonsense that is homoeopathy, belief in the supernatural or anything as hum-drum as that, I’m talking of course about the big lies, the existence of ‘truth’, ‘justice’, ‘fairness’ and more recently ‘europe’ and ‘democracy’ not to mention ‘media balance’.

Is this woman inarticulate? Yes. Does she genuinely feel disenfranchised? Yes

The late Terry Pratchett put it well in the closing exchange of ‘Hogfather’ with:

YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. “So we can believe the big ones?” YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. “They’re not the same at all!” YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET — Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

Yet otherwise self-described sceptical and rational people right now are fighting over just such fantasies. ‘Is Europe a good thing?’, ‘was the recent referendum democratic?’ — they might as well ask ‘is beauty truth’?

Featured: An argument that polarises rather than communicates

I’ve previously written about how in order to effectively communicate as a society, we must aspire to a common lexicon, or at least acknowledge where we have as-yet failed to do so. Now we are confronting this miscommunication on a national and possibly even global scale. When leave advocates say they are tired of ‘the elites’ controlling politics, which different groups says this and which elites? When remain advocates reject perceived nationalist racism associated with leave, why is this so-often used to dismiss the legitimate criticism?

In recent political history we saw the tip of this iceberg personified by Gordon Brown in what I’m referring to as ‘that-bigoted-woman-gate’, something which played easily into the hands of the then Tory opposition. However this time, with the vast majority of the political establishment in the ‘remain’ camp, it remains to be seen who other than a prospective Eurosceptic Tory leader — who’ll face intense internal party pressures — or Farage — who is not an MP and commands insignificant direct parliamentary power — is placed to channel the potential for popularist support. So now we have a political vacuum caused by an unexpected outcome of a popularist vote which no one knows what to do with. Only our hard-to-enter representative democracy has protected politicians from this sentiment for so long. Along with Corbyn’s grass roots support dramas, the system whereby our elected represent had — or were perceived to have — their shit together is in full scale collapse.

My suggestion for making progress as an individual in this area is as always: talk. Define and explain your terms and don’t just post shitty memes to virtue signal to people who already agree with you. Every time you preach to the converted, ask yourself — are you happy to polarise the camps further? What if they actually have something of substance to say!

And when people are unwilling or unable to define their terms, I say call them out on their intellectual dishonesty and disguising their signalling as understanding.

Note, I am of course closely following the London Independence movement — the blog is pirate.london for a reason — which is of course, a complete fantasy, it is not a real thing. But perhaps it can be a useful discussion point, that’s what matters.