to be used was Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former derivatives trader and now writer, who said, ‘Derivatives trading is all about how to make a bonus and how to screw your client.’ It became clear that, ‘Financial institutions took on debt worth 40 times their assets – and failed to understand how risky this was.’5 When financial institutions became computerized, they acquired software that produced ‘models’ that purported to predict the outcome of certain financial activities, that is, what risk was being run by these financial activities. The model was an abstract concept called value at risk (VAR). When VAR included the kinds of crises that occur once in a lifetime, the result would suggest that the venture to be undertaken was far too risky. If once-in-a-lifetime crises were not included, the result suggested that it was fine to undertake what Paul Mason, Economics Editor of BBC Newsnight, called ‘suicidal risk-taking’.6 This was the kind of risk-taking that financial institutions preferred. After all, it won’t happen, will it? But it did.
The unexpected often happens in private and public life. Everyone should know that from their own personal experience. Yet many people tell themselves the comforting lie, ‘My actions will have limited consequences.’ We learn as children that small actions can have surprisingly large and unexpected results, yet in adulthood many people pretend that they never knew this. When three windows of Sir Fred Goodwin’s large home were smashed, as was the rear window of his Mercedes parked in the driveway, Sir Fred was reported to be ‘shaken’. Why would people do a thing like that? Sir Fred, when head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, had plunged the bank into ruinous debt, resulting in the bank having to be propped up by £20 billion of public money. When he resigned, he could see no reason why he should not keep his £3 million tax-free lump sum as well as his £700,000 a year pension.7 Why would that lead to people feeling so angry that they destroyed his property? When people tell themselves, ‘My actions will have limited consequences’, they have usually already constructed a fantasy about what those limited consequences will be. Perhaps Sir Fred had a fantasy about a very pleasant early retirement with a few lucrative directorships and the occasional attendance at some committee of the Great and the Good. Apparently, Sir Fred had no idea that some people might hate him so much they would try to harm him, nor that for the rest of his life he would be pursued by the paparazzi. In March 2009 the world’s media were offering the top price for a photograph of Sir Fred relaxing. By August he was back in Edinburgh. According to Phillip Inman of the Guardian, writing in October 2009, ‘He has turned to PR experts to rebuild his reputation, as yet to no avail.’8
The universal and most popular lie we tell ourselves is, ‘I am superior to other people.’ Many people claim this superiority because they hold certain beliefs about their religion, race, nationality, class or gender, while others claim their superiority simply because they were born into a certain family. All feel that this superiority entitles them to patronize, denigrate, ignore, cheat, or harm those whom they see as their inferiors. In clinging to this lie, they deny the similarities we all share. Our species varies very little genetically, and we have the same needs, desires and fears. We all want to be recognized for being the person that we are, to have a respected role in our society, and to enjoy good relationships with others.
All the immense problems we face today – a global financial crisis, climate change along with the pollution and despoiling of the planet – derive from the way certain people have told themselves that they are superior to the people they are harming, and therefore entitled to do what they do. When the British, Germans, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese established their empires, they told themselves that they were rescuing those they colonized from their ignorance and degradation, and they were saving their souls, when the truth was that these empire builders were engaged in theft on a massive scale. Believing that merely having a religious faith is sufficient to show that you are both virtuous and superior has allowed vast numbers of people to harm others and feel no shame. Lying to ourselves is very easy, and we can always think of a lie that seems to allow us to do what we do.
Can we change?
As religious leaders have demonstrated down the centuries, exhortations to be virtuous rarely change people’s ideas about how they should behave. It is always easy to deplore other people’s behaviour, but we are not inclined to change our own behaviour at the behest of those who see themselves as having moral authority. Threats of punishment by the law can lead us to appear to change, but we simply keep our ideas to ourselves. Under Communist rule many people made an ‘inner emigration’ and lived an unpolitical life.9 People change their ideas when they voluntarily examine their own ideas and the consequences of their ideas, and decide to change.
In the course of my work I have seen many individuals decide to change how they saw themselves and their world so that they now live a much more satisfactory life. In Germany there have been some profound changes in ideas. Many countries with pasts that many of their inhabitants want to forget or deny have tried to deal with their legacy by holding some kind of inquiry, but the Germans dealt with life under Communist rule with Germanic thoroughness. Garton Ash wrote, ‘Germany has had trials and purges and truth commissions and has systematically opened the secret police files to each and every individual who wants to know what was done to him or her – or what he or she did to others. This is unique.’10 In his conclusion written in 2009, Garton Ash pointed out that, since 1997, the technological revolution has put into the hands of the British and American governments, and into the hands of private security firms the means of spying on individuals that are far beyond what Nazi and Communist leaders could ever have imagined. He wrote, ‘East Germans today have their privacy better protected by the state than we do in Britain. Precisely because lawmakers and judges know what it was like to live in a Stasi state, and before that a Nazi one, they have guarded these things more jealously than we, the British, who take them for granted. You value health most when you have been sick.’11
In 2009 when the BBC correspondent Mark Mardell was leaving his post in Europe, he wrote what he called a final essay on Europe. There he said, ‘Germany is still the most important economic and political power in Europe, but with a sense of responsibility, an ability to reflect upon its past, a horror of war, that is I think unique and little short of a miracle, an outcome few historians studying the aftermath of past conflicts could even have dared to predict. It’s probably the most grown-up country in the world today.’12
Another change in how people think began in the 1970s with what then was called self-help. People with problems such as poor housing or chronic illness lost patience with the experts who were supposed to be helping them, and got together with others suffering in the same way to solve the problem they shared. Some of these self-help groups became movements, many of which effected the changes they sought. In her book The Wisdom of Whores the extraordinarily truthful epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, writing about AIDS, said, ‘It wasn’t doctors who kick-started the response to this infectious disease, it was gay men. With a flair for dramatic presentation and an inside knowledge of what makes the communications industry tick, they battered down the doors of the medical establishment, assaulted the pharmaceutical industry, took the press by storm. They gave AIDS a political face.’13
The Internet and the World Wide Web revolutionized how people communicate with one another. Politicians, media moguls and the police have been forced to adapt themselves, though not without complaint, to the power of disparate groups of people all around the world. Here in London the police might have changed from using force to a softly softly approach with the people in the Climate Change movement, but whether they understand and accept what the Climate Change people are doing is another matter.
Unfortunately, many of those who organize for a cause have not learned from history. Neither exhortations nor the