How can ‘Remainers’ talk to ‘Brexiters’?

It is very heartening that so many people marched on Saturday to demonstrate for a second referendum but it merely highlights the immediate problem.

Andrew Rawnsely (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/21/only-when-mps-stare-into-the-abyss-will-they-agree-to-a-peoples-vote) points out that MPs are frightened to back a new referendum for various reasons but two are particularly significant, “Some are fearful that another referendum would turn Britain into a country even more disfigured by ugly division. Others – and this is, of course, particularly true of MPs with a large Leave vote in their constituencies – are in a panic that there will be a backlash which could cost them their jobs at the next election. These are not arguments of principle against another referendum, but they are feelings that will have to be overcome to secure one.”
Of course, the Brexit MPs have a different reason to fear a second referendum, namely that their constituency is gradually decreasing.

For myself, I would much rather that the decision not to leave the EU would be made in Parliament by our elected representatives because that is the sort of democracy we are. But that, as Rawnsely points out, is not going to happen until MPs stare into an abyss that is created by accepting neither a no-deal nor May’s deal.

All of this is about group dynamics and will be an interesting area to think about from that point of view. But, today, I want to think about something else and to try to bring a psychoanalytic model to help us.

The problem I want to address is how Remainers might speak to Brexiters. The symptoms of the problem can be reduced to stereotypes. The Brexiters say about the Remainers that they can’t accept that they lost, they insist that the referendum was a ‘democratic’ vote indicating the ‘voice of the people’ and that Remainers are anti-democratic.

Meanwhile Remainers feel justified to be extremely rude about the intellectual capacities of the Brexiters, who appear to them clearly incapable of seeing that they were lied to by their leaders before the referendum and cannot see the economic and social truth about the costs of leaving the EU both now, and for their children and grandchildren.

At the risk of repeating myself, I take the view that focussing on people misses important information about the unconscious, group dynamics. This view arises from my experience of consulting to organisations and I take it as symptomatic of group/organisational dysfunction that the system becomes preoccupied with personality and persons.

Having said that, on this occasion, I want to see what we know from individual, interpersonal psychology that might shed light on this impasse.

The pattern of the attitudes of each side towards the other, particularly the presence of denigration and impotent frustration, are familiar to me from over 40 years of participating in clinical discussions about the treatment of patients. It is a description that clinicians often provide when the work with their patients has become stuck and feels impossible.

The principle that will lead to the best chance for the work to resume is that the clinician has to understand that they have become caught up in the ‘content’ of the discussion, in other words, treating items of the conversation as if that is concretely what needs to be focussed on. The clinician has temporarily forgotten that what patients bring to talk about is only the surface ‘representation’ of something much more primitive and disturbing deep below the surface. The clinician’s supervisor or colleagues will help to revitalise the engagement, if they can identify the underlying anxieties in the patient.

Anxieties, which might be defined as stress linked to an imagined future challenge, take over the mind, which expends a great deal of effort creating psychological ways to avoid the imagined source of anxiety. Experience shows that helping people to discover what their underlying anxieties are and then helping them to think about them, can create significant change.

If the anxiety is large enough, we collapse into a state of mind that I’ve often described here and which I prefer to call the fundamentalist state of mind. One of the features of this condition is that uncertainty or not knowing is hated and the only thing that is valued is certainty. That’s because certainty has the effect of reducing anxiety. It is like a drug. It is in this state that we are likely to transform beliefs (ideas which are known not to be facts and are therefore waiting for evidence) into facts. Such a state of mind is not open to questioning these ‘facts’, because of the comfort that derives from them, which is why truth has no impact in this world.

In addition to this, a brilliant psychologist called Leon Festinger, in 1957, presented a theory of cognitive dissonance, which refers to an internal emotional stress if we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs. Amongst other things, he showed that, if we make a silly mistake or loudly or publicly espouse an attitude that we realise or discover is not what we truly hold, this creates internal dissonance that has to be resolved. In these circumstances, we resolve the dissonance by pretending to ourselves, and, therefore, to others, that we meant to do this all along. Indeed, the contrary belief can be held more passionately than our original one.

Suppose that we are overwhelmed by feelings of rage and inadequacy consequent on being very poor in a country in which there are very wealthy people. This constant state of struggle will create massive anxiety about our future. We can see that we are marginalised, and we are filled with a sense of impending catastrophe. How easy it is to provide us with that certainty that soothes such a state by telling us that the sense of impending catastrophe is an imminent invasion of foreigners who will rob us of what little we have. How easy to convince us that the place where all the wealth and power resides (wealth and power which ought to be ours) is in Europe and how easy to trick us into believing that restoring ‘sovereignty’ will mean that these political leaders who are explaining all this to us will take over the decision-making from Europe and make us their priority.

I am an unapologetic Remainer. I have no intention in this blog to sketch my reasons. My anxiety, which puts me in danger of being rude to Leavers is that leaving Europe will leave me, my family, my children and my grandchildren outside the safety of an organisation that can provide some protection from superpowers and terrorist organisations that aim to damage my way of life and our future fulfilment. That leaving Europe will reveal us to be the weak and insignificant country that we have actually become. That, overnight, we will become seriously poorer and that those who will be hit hardest are the ordinary men and women who voted to leave. Not their leaders, who are actually part of the wealthy minority who have created such mind-blowing inequality.

I want to speak to Brexiters about the true sources of inequality and the truth about immigration, namely that it has always benefitted the receiving country. I want to speak to the underlying anxiety because it is an anxiety that I share.