Milkshakes, hot takes, democracy and me
One of the ways the competing intersections of my diverse professional life throw up interesting dilemmas is in how the different worlds compete and collide. How do we decide what is best for us and what we can achieve? Do we use emotions, or what is termed “rational decision making”? In a democracy how people make decisions and what those decisions mean for us all is a central problem, both in terms of how democracy works, and how it is sustained.
If a young man throws a milkshake over a politician is that decision, that choice, a threat to democracy? In a country where we currently have one man in prison for murdering an MP for being an MP, and another in prison for planning a similar murder, it’s a decision that deserves a proportionate and rational analysis. For reasons that might become clear below, I think hot takes are more of a threat to democracy than milkshakes.
Coaching as a practice is about how we help individuals make decisions. Often, as a practice, it’s best to start from who do you want to be, not what do you want to do next. The language of traditional leadership coaching, of authenticity and finding our pole star to guide our navigation, is about providing a framework for the decisions we have to make on a day by day basis.
The way I’ve always understood that process is that our rational commitment to the goal, to being our true self, overcomes the kneejerk reaction that reflects the hot takes of our emotions, of the moment. In coaching we attempt to become aware of the process and choose how to manage it. Let me give you two examples, one apparently trivial, one painfully serious. First, the trivia, which is analogous to Nigel Farage’s ruined suit problems in Newcastle.
One summer day, fifteen years ago, I was due to meet the leader of the organization I worked for. As a committed Labour supporter, and a committed party employee, an invitation to a garden party at Downing Street was no small thing.
The day did not start well. I was due to meet my colleagues at Newcastle Central Station, to travel as a group on one block booking on the train. That went wrong when the bus driver from Cramlington to Newcastle got lost and had to go on a fifteen minute loop around all the stops he’d missed in his meandering exploration of industrial estates and the incompatibility of double decker buses and low bridges. He was no navigator but his three point turn was impeccable, and urgent. While hee tried to make good his error, I tried to be a good passenger, despite the sense of time being lost and plans unravelling.
Being a good bus passenger didn’t help. I was stranded at Newcastle Station, with my colleagues gone and with them my ticket. A day return would be a quarter of my monthly bills. Not panicking, honestly, I sprinted across town and got a coach. With luck and no low bridges I would get to London in time for our four o’clock date at Downing Street, whiling away my time on the bus while my colleagues went sightseeing and took a trip on the London Eye.
The final piece of my imperfect day came somewhere between Wetherby and Sheffield. A service station sandwich deposited a perfect circle of mayonnaise on my pristine, and carefully chosen tie. I felt ready to give up. I take pride in my ability to scrub up well, and the thought of facing Tony Blair with a roadmap of my ill chosen lunch on my tie was beyond the pale. Trivial, yes, but I felt lonely, and contemplated returning home. It took half an hour to decide whether to give up, or to go on.
The answer, of course, was Tie Rack at Victoria Station, round the corner from the less salubrious and less well served coach station, and I presented myself at the rendezvous point with another pristine and well chosen tie. There’d been three or four moments when the hot take had been to give up, but at that time my key ambition was to prove to my colleagues that I could cope with whatever was thrown at me, and I did it. As you can possibly tell, I’ve dined out on the anecdote of being the bloke in a suit on the National Express a few times.
So when I saw Nigel Farage, pride and jacket ruined by a milkshake, giving up on his visit to Newcastle I felt some empathy for his decision; it’s hard to make good choices when your perfectly planned clothing is in disarray and you are in a strange place with nothing but your emotions to guide you.
Like my bus journey, this may all seem a little meandering, so it’s time to throw in some theory. Ask political organizers what matters, emotions or rational decision making and the odds are they’ll refer you to one of the modern theorists like Drew Westen. Westen’s take on the conflict between what we want and how we feel is absolutely clear; ‘In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins.’
There are two ways of understanding that emphatic statement. Either, in human life, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins, or politics is a special case, where decisions are made differently to the way we make decisions in the rest of our lives. I can see the argument that my emotional reaction to all my plans going awry might make me vulnerable to a stained tie reminding me of being the kid whose clothes excited the wrong kind of attention and scrutiny at school, and that that’s different to how we make political choices, but that’s special pleading to me.
I promised a serious example about rational thought trumping emotion, and here it is from a very different world to garden parties at Number 10. Early in my experience of being a cyclist, I was riding in a poorly organized sportive around some of the more intimidating hills of Northumberland. Weary, hard pressed and worrying about whether I’d finish, my nerves began jangling as I rode up a serious hill and the air ambulance circled overhead. Just over the brow of the hill was the reason; a fellow rider had suffered a heart attack, and wouldn’t be going home that night, or ever again. I left him surrounded by the air ambulance team, and made my way back to the event finish, haunted by the fact that he reminded me of myself.
I’m still a cyclist, and still reminded of him. There are moments when my heart rate is in the red (in my case, over about 92% of maximum heart rate) that he comes to mind. It could be overwhelming, but it’s not. A family health crisis meant I had an echo cardiogram not long after that event; my heart works as it should. I ride with a heart rate monitor, and thanks to some great coaches I’ve learned to manage my efforts, my nutrition, my understanding of how to pace myself. Sweatbox efforts on the turbo on winter training nights give me a library of reactions to consult which bolster my understanding that, when his face intrudes as I race, I have done everything I can to manage the risks of my heart giving out under the strain.
I have no knowledge of whether he had done all those things, but I know that according to all the advice I’ve had, from cardiologists to coaches, I’ve done everything I can, and that enables me to resist the kneejerk hot take of the emotional fear that I will break if I continue.
Drew Westen is a political adviser and theorist in a political climate where winning elections is everything for the teams involved. Appeals to the emotions, both explicitly and implicitly, are the everyday currency of American politics, and increasingly, of British politics. The idea that elections are the test of different, but rationally based models of how society should be has been replaced by competing barrages of appeals to the emotions. In such a climate, where no-one is encouraged to pause and make rational decisions, the emotions will ultimately win. Being rational is a practice, not a reflex — and in there lurks a conflation of two of the best insights I’ve taken from Erich Fromm, who said that love is the only rational solution to the problem of human existence, and that love is a practice, not an emotion.
The problem is the emotional culture this political climate creates. Hot takes, the emotional journalistic response that masquerades as the first draft of history amplify the sense that what matters is how we feel, not in the fullness of time, but in that moment. We all want to rage, and we all want to cry, and damn the consequences for those around us, but we also all know that we resist those temptations for the sake of family, of friends, for the very good reason that there are moments when our emotions should not take primacy. Or to put it another way, that there are times when we need to practice love, not surrender to feelings.
Let’s go back to my two examples. The trivial example first; when I felt like crying with exasperation on that coach, contemplating my ruined tie, emotions were not what I needed. As much as the memory of being that boy who hated his cheap clothes being mocked at school wanted to take over, I needed to be rational and grown up and to do what I’m good at, weighing up options and making choices. Take the serious example; part of me, the man who always seeks to be useful, to help if he can, wanted to intervene, to be useful. There was no need for that though; the man was surrounded by trained medics; there were police to control the traffic, and there was nothing I could do except not be in the way, despite my emotions wanting to useful, to be helpful, to feel like something more than a bystander.
If, in our current political system, emotions are trumping rational decisions, it may be that we’ve lost the political art, between elections, of engaging ourselves in detailed discussions about what we want, and how we might achieve it. By any standard, Labour should have lost the 1945 election; all the cards were stacked against them, emotionally and politically. That they won was a reward for a fifteen year debate about what sort of Britain should and could be delivered; what made the Beveridge Report so powerful, so influential, was not its content but the extent to which it had been discussed and debated, so that voters were invited to make rational choices even when confronted with emotional appeals such as Churchill insisting that Labour would need a Gestapo to deliver its welfare state.
My view is that those debates between 1931 and 1945 about what kind of welfare state Britain deserved and could afford were a self coaching exercise for the Labour supporting portion of the electorate; they resisted the emotional appeals to fear and chose to stick with their conclusions about the kind of country they wanted to live in because they had chosen a pole star and what kind of authentic Britain they aspired to live in.
A journalistic culture of hot takes and emotional appeals to fear of the other, to the knee jerk common sense response that says milkshakes are the biggest problem we face in a society where MPs can be murdered for just being MPs is not inevitable; politics is just like any other human activity, and if we want to, we can choose to be our authentic selves, pursuing our goals rather than running from our fears.
