Back when I lived in the world of business I sometimes used this opening conversation gambit: How do you handle disappointment? A little joke to ease the tension, a little signal that my answer was going to be no, or a hundred thousand dollars less. Never my own money, I should add. I’m no high roller myself.
They were such very much more optimistic days. I see that now, even though at the time there was still plenty to be fretting about. There’s never a time when this bloody economy will not be something for people to hang their problems on.
But still, very much more positive and optimistic times, even with the existential worries of nuclear warheads and free-market zealotry. You had the sense of an upward arc: rising life expectancy, vaccinations for everyone, more and more computing power, more and more computers, ever more young people getting ever more levels of education, civil rights, Treaty rights, human rights all getting fair and decent recognition.
And in movie after movie, book after book we would go back to the Nazis, and the Holocaust, and the slave trade, and everything else that was clearly unspeakable and indefensible. The lesson had been learned, for all time, surely.
Then the tide started coming back in. This has not been a disappointment I have handled well.
In the USA this week the Supreme Court happily unwound all the work of the 1960s that had ensured Black people were no longer denied a vote, a voice, a place, by those who had lost the Civil War but never lost their determination to disempower and disenfranchise the slaves and their descendants. Their right to gerrymander and disenfranchise was approved by a partisan court that has no shame and they have wasted no time in exercising their power anew.
Here in our own little islands, Paul Goldsmith, the happy handmaiden to Seymour’s neocolonial libertarian ambitions, has energetically thrown himself into stripping Treaty references out of our laws. He and his dismal party would have you see this as just plain commonsense, and fair to all and unifying. Bullshit it is. What they’re really aiming for is a reinstitution of monocultural hegemony. What they really want is to shut down the voices that don’t sing from the same song-sheet about every invested buck being sacred.
In general, thinking and expressing opinions and voicing a contrary point of view is something they don’t welcome. The right to be heard is being happily trashed wherever the opportunity presents itself: curriculum review, local government reform, the Broadcasting Standards Authority.
They put on a great pearl-clutching performance last election over your right to be heard and local representation being taken away from you by Three Waters. But do they really care about your local community rights? Please see this week’s local government edict before coming to any conclusion other than: the fuck they do.
This is the context in which to understand what is motivating David Seymour when he decides to try heavying RNZ. They love free speech right up until it’s saying things they’d rather not hear. Andthey have always had a decent chunk of their supporters who see free speech as having no validity for doubters and hippies and lefties who don’t understand what’s what.
How should one handle disappointment? Maybe better to never get too optimistic, to imagine that people will come around eventually.
No victory is permanent, a wise head wrote this week, politics never ends.
Why? Blame selfishness, blame stupidity, blame cupidity, blame evil.
Some people are so selfish they don’t even notice their boot is crushing your foot as they lean in for another plate of oysters.
Some people cannot get a clue if you smear them in clue musk during clue rutting season.
Some people are so evil they turn it into their selling point.
My mistake has been imagining that everyone can eventually be reached, that the right argument delivered with sufficient patience and good faith can eventually land. This is pointless when there are people who are not operating in good faith and never were.
Look at the foundational philosophy of Peter Thiel’s Palantir and you realise some people never moved on.
They say liberal democracy is incompatible with capitalism.
They say the extension of voting rights has been a mistake.
They say the people who know best should run things, and the people who don’t should be managed.
They say a small technocratic elite should make decisions that markets and governments have proven too weak to make.
What they’re saying is they want to demolish much of what is best about the way we live.
What this tells me is that I need to accept that some people aren’t going to come around, ever, to seeing things in a decent way.
Those of us who believe in a fairer and more liberal and more progressive way of living need to be making our case always and everywhere, but also recognise that some people will never accept it.
Never assume you’ve won, never assume it’s finished, never give up.
This week there was a wonderful post by a grandmother on social media:
I went to federal court this morning to contest my citation for blocking access to the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon. The video I showed the federal attorneys was the proverbial picture worth a thousand words. Video ended. Citation dismissed. Thank you to all who encouraged me.
How do you handle disappointment? You stop giving bad people the benefit of the doubt.
