Nationalisation, Corbyn’s reason for Brexit, is a false belief.

I’m extremely privileged to be accompanying my daughter on her A level politics course. Not only does it help me to understand the language of politicians, it has reinforced my instinct that what is missing from economic and political debate is any understanding of the minds of individuals alone and in groups.
I discovered a few years ago, when my deep concern about some of the crazy developments in Western societies provoked me to try to understand the thinking of politicians implicated in the chaos, that economics is a collection of theories of money that requires, centrally, an understanding of human behaviour. And yet I could find no evidence that any economist had ever ventured out of the narcissism of his own arrogance to learn from anything discovered by those of us in the psychological field about human behaviour *. Hence the quintessential example, the total nonsense of the 3 assumptions that support the Free Market, Neo-liberal ideology that Thatcher and Reagan brought in and which has been followed mindlessly by every government since then.
Now I discover that political theorists have also approached understanding human behaviour from the same isolated arrogance that the economists share; the view that they can just invent these theories without any reference to any of the painstaking research that we have all been pursuing in the arena of psychology.
For example, Tony Benn (and hence his acolyte, Jeremy Corbyn) correctly see that ‘bosses’ by and large exploit their workers to create profits. At this point you might wonder how this happens and happens again and continues to happen; in other words what it is about human beings that leads to this arrangement. But, no, it turns out that politicians, like trainee doctors (experienced ones have learnt not to do this), rush to a prescription! It is terrifying.
When I go to a Dr because I am secretly convinced that I have a massive heart problem and need a coronary bypass; what I really want is that she will actually take the trouble to investigate my symptoms, ignore my panic explanation and take the time to discover that I have ‘heart-burn’ i.e. indigestion and it will pass.
It is true that all organisations can develop a culture in which the Senior Management seek, more and more, to impose their rules on the workforce. It is true that, when you interview these people, you will learn that they seem seriously to believe that the workforce are lazy, greedy, dangerous and so on and are a threat to the successful running of the enterprise. Anyone currently working in the NHS will recognise this. However it is NOT true to form the conclusion that this is true of all organisations and that they all need brain transplants. Yes, brain transplants: Benn and Corbyn believe(d) that the only solution is to nationalise all systems of production in the mistaken view that the ‘brain’ of the government is somehow immune from the disease that afflicts those managers I was describing earlier.
Which is why I use the NHS as the example of this sort of dysfunction BECAUSE IT IS (JUST) NATIONALISED!!!
The reason that organisations collapse into this shape of exploitation is two-fold; anxiety, and the absence of institutional structures that serve to provide those human mechanisms that make the individual function at his or her best, namely: Curiosity and Interest, leading to: The capacity to face reality, the capacity to collect information about internal and external reality, the capacity to turn that into symbols that can be thought about and the capacity actually to think. (I have described this more fully in a video, “Problems with Organisations”.)
This has been known about in the world of Organisational Consultation as understood from the Group Relations tradition exemplified by the Tavistock model. Best, and most relevantly articulated by one of the most influential of its proponents, Elliott Jaques in his seminal work, “The Changing Culture of a Factory; a study of authority and participation in an industrial setting” (1951).
People criticising the Corbyn/Benn philosophy often cite the obvious, that there has never been a successful attempt to pursue these socialist ideals. And there hasn’t. But all that happens is that this is treated as blow in a battle, not a stimulus to curiosity that might lead to an enquiry as to why this is so.
Which would lead to the discovery of the principles to which I allude.
Meanwhile all that happens in the minds of people like Corbyn is that they believe that, because they are such well-meaning human beings, the outcome will be different under their watch.
It won’t, it can’t be. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told that the boss of the organisation that I’m invited to consult to is a psychopath. Mostly they aren’t. There are very few psychopaths in the world. But it is certainly true that the bosses seem, at first sight, to behave that way. The understanding of organisations that I represent explains this as the central symptom of organisational dysfunction, namely that individuals become drawn into roles that represent that problem and then the whole organisation becomes focussed on the personal; on people not on the task.
In other words, however benign and well-meaning you are, if your organisation isn’t built around the principles I described earlier, the anxiety that arises from the task, because it cannot be turned into ‘information’, will drive you to behave in a more and more psychopathic way in relationship with your staff who you (almost correctly) deduce to be the source of your surge of your anxiety. In fact they are merely the messengers; the anxiety is what they feel in consequence of getting on with the work. It’s normal but it becomes debilitating and frightening if it isn’t attended to by a system that cares and can be interested.

[*Actually, it seems to me highly likely that Maynard Keynes actually was affected by the psychology of Freud which was so central to the thinking of the Bloomsbury set of which he was a member. This would account for how his assumptions about human behaviour have a real link to psychological theories.]