A while back, Tom kindly drew my attention to a Youtube clip given by an evolutionary psychologist on why Starmer might be the way he is, and why having him in power might be problematic for the rest of society. He also gave an interesting take on Boris and talked about the characteristics that seem to be most prevalent in politicians today and which make them a thankless proposition for the rest of us.
For those of you who don’t know, an evolutionary psychologist is someone who studies the development of the human brain over time from the perspective of how the pressures of evolution and survival needs may have influenced it.
This evolutionary psychologist made a very good case for Starmer having been so rigidly parented in order not to cause stress to his sick mother, that he ended up denying one of his main childhood developmental needs, to learn about and control his emotions safely, in order to parent her. He was denied a “safe base” and ended up with unstable attachment issues.
The idea was that as a result, he became the robotic personality and the rigidly opinionated person that we know today; free of emotions, but not in a psychopathic way as he does have proto feelings underneath it all. According to the author, he is so terrified of losing control of them, he keeps his underdeveloped emotions as far down as it is possible to go, which accounts for his slightly inhuman presentation in public. If this is true, he is at the developmental stage of a four- or five-year-old in this aspect, which is of course concerning for the rest of us as he is the current prime minister!
As theories go it’s a reasonable working hypothesis as one explanation of the rather alien, slightly inhuman presentation he gives; unless of course he’s completely different in private.
One of the challenges to this sort of theorising is that we can never really know. And why would that be? Because, we don’t know what his individual mind made of his experiences; unless of course he opts for therapy one day and then whomever he chooses may gain an insight denied to the rest of us.
Epictetus said, a very long time ago, “it is not the things that happen which are important, but what is made of them”.
And that is the problem with theories of mind. They should be true for everyone if they are correct and indeed some of the most concrete ones are; such as walking, toilet training development of more complex thinking as one matures which can be tested at various ages. I am thinking of Piaget here, but even his timelines have been questioned in recent years as to when children can or cannot abstract. A lot of it depends on how the abstraction is presented to and received by the subject being tested.
All theories of mind have these sorts of problems and the proof of the pudding can sometimes be very hard to prove. One cohort may fit the model perfectly, but another may give negative results.
Why? Because we really are individually different from each other and even close blood relations in ways that can confuse, even if the variations are small. It really does depend on what the individual makes of the information they are processing.
But back to Starmer. For longevity of testing, two parents producing offspring and bringing them to maturity with access to a wider blood family group has worked for most of our particular species for millennia. By most of our species, I mean that about 80 to 90% of people raised in this way learn the skills they need to make their way in the world as adults. No one has a perfect childhood because it can’t exist. Once maturity has been achieved, the person is capable of looking back on childhood experiences with different eyes and a wider understanding of circumstances. This allows upsets and early problems to be relegated to that past where they cannot harm the person in the present. In self-aware species, it is one of the parental tasks to learn and understand the way their children are interpreting information and correct misconceptions as they arise. This certainly didn’t seem to have happened in Starmer’s family, but that can’t be all either. Many children have been robbed of, or had their childhood squashed seemingly beyond redemption, but eventually transition to a successful adulthood.
So, one of the other things that contribute to this is the individual nature of the person and the basic personality framework they are born with. If they are lucky, both things match most of the time and things are not too traumatic. The third influencer is the shared culture and history that informs the way people behave in groups and what they expect of the society they are born into.
Normally, this sort of thing is or is not a problem for the immediate family and any others that come within the confines of an individual life. By this I mean school, employment and if things are going badly wrong, the police and the judiciary. Being able to impose the effect of an individual existence on others who might never have known that the person was alive in the world exploded with the internet.
Some of the consequences of this are only just being understood or even thought about.
Pre internet, it was possible, when thinking about who to vote for, to know that right or left, a person could understand the cultural influences on a politician and their desire to build on and enhance that culture. Not now.
Tony Blair was the first politician who had no cultural allegiance and made a virtue of it.
Other politicians on both sides followed eagerly and the culmination of all this uncoupling from culture and history? I give you Kier Starmer, the ultimate hollow man.
In many ways it does not matter why he is hollow, that is still a problem for his nearest and dearest. What is more important is that in the years since Blair came to power, the public have been manipulated into accepting such oil-slick personalities as legitimate representatives of the British state and like the internet, he now intrudes on all of us, but unlike the internet, we can’t turn him off for five years. This is a state he can’t even see in terms of the rest of the world, let alone defend.
From a hollow man’s perspective, he has finally got power over an island off the coast of Europe and can now do anything he likes. If you want to live here, don’t upset the owner, he won’t thank you for it.
We no longer have a connection to those who would “serve us”, through a shared history and culture. Voting for people is now like signing up for online dating. The external package is full of glamour but the reality once the formalities are out of the way is anything but. We can no longer take it for granted that, through our cultural heritage, we can trust them with the country, even if we think their ideas are flawed.
I can completely see why people might want to analyse Starmer, in the same way they might want to understand a Martian. There is a certain sort of fascination about seeing what he is going to do next and wondering how long he can stay up on the high wire without falling.
People in general have an appetite for this sort of thing in small doses, because a part of them can’t quite believe it is happening, another part wants to see what the creature will do next and another part is grateful the focus is not on them and they can sit on the side observing safely. What a strange mix we all are.
I think it’s about time we stopped asking people what their intentions are when they get into power. The hollow man generation needs rooting out. We should devise a way to test how people have behaved in the past and how they deal with stress, frustration, things that make them angry and do they share the culture and history of those they would govern. Examples will be required!
Sadly, I’m sure people would find a way round it. The difference between say. Nigel and Kier, is that Nigel has shown a consistent respect for and has been willing to fight for the interests of this country from when he was an MEP. Kier would not understand what I have just said and fail to see the relevance.
I’m not sure we are asking the right question here. A better one would be why was it so very easy to fool us into not only accepting a procession of hollow men and what do we need to do to get rid of them. People seem to have developed the idea that if we can only understand them and put that understanding into a convincing narrative, all will be well.
We need to wake up, whilst there is still a chance.