Understanding Brexit (and Trump)

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about how the Brexit and Trump campaigns were so successful. (I owe most of ths thought process to a very inspiring session about our shadow selves from Paul and Angie Woods, during a weekend focussed on the Enneagram). What was it, apart from the arguments made and the general feeling of discontent that appealed so deeply to the national psyches of the United Kingdom and the United States respectively?

 

I think there is some real wisdom to be gleaned from the Enneagram about the corporate personalities of the UK and USA, which might help us to understand why the majority voted as they did and how we might want to understand and embrace our corporate mind-sets as we look to develop a positive politics of peace for the future.

 

Richard Rohr has done some helpful work, as have others, on the personality types or dominant psyches of various nations. I agree with his perspective that Great Britain has a Type 6 personality and the USA is of Type 3. The root struggle for a type 6 personality is the need to be secure – therefore any campaign based on fear (of not having enough Sovereignty, of not having control of our money, of the “other” people who keep coming here and taking away our sense of national identity) touches on our deepest need and struggle. For a type 3 personality, the root struggle is the need to succeed and so the promise to ‘make America great again’ strikes the chord that tugs on the heart strings.

 

enneagram-3-6-9-healthSo, focusing in on the UK (maybe some thoughts on the lovely USA another time), if we are to shift the political discourse towards something more healthy for the future, we need to learn to listen to the part of us that feels the need to be safe. We need to understand the ‘shadow’ part of our corporate personality that is anxious and fearful, admitting to ourselves what drives our thoughts and actions. When a Type 6 personality is not in a healthy place, they will begin to regress into a Type 3 pattern of thinking. So, the underlying drive to be safe becomes the need to get noticed and be special. So, post-brexit, some of which was about the need to be safe, we find our politicans trying to re-assert our Soverignty and our ‘Greatness’. Only a couple of weeks ago, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, was declaring on the radio that we don’t realise quite how the rest of the world sees us. Apparently, they admire us and think we need to continue showing great leadership in the world. We continue to believe this about ourselves, that we are very special and have a vital role which the rest of the world needs us to play. I wonder if we actually asked the rest of the world whether or not this is true, they might laugh in our face, pat us on the head and gently remind us that the world has moved on, but maybe we have not.

enneagram-6

 

Great Britain, as a Type 6 corporate personality, has an innate sense of loyalty. After the NHS, our Royal Family reamins the most popular part of our national identity, according to recent surveys. We carry a sense of being ‘loyal subjects’ who ‘do our duty for Queen and Country’. We are reliable, dependable, a safe pair of hands. But when our security is threatened, when we feel we are losing control, when we are told again and again that our borders are not safe, we begin to seek our security externally. We shut others out, we stop trusting others to make rules we don’t feel we have enough control over, build more weapons and ensure our finances work primarily for us. This then leads us towards a tendancy for workoholism, and so then we cut the nation state, drive people back into work, making an argument that it is the ‘lazy poor’ who are in part to blame for some of our mess. We become much more image conscious of our perceived role in the world and go on a charm offensive to remind people just how special we really are. But let me just state this: this is not a very healthy way to behave or live in the world.

 

I know this isn’t going to sound ‘Great’, but it is my perspective that ‘Great Britain’ left the European Union out of a place of fear, which has drawn us to try and re-discover our ‘special’ place in the world. During the referendum, some of our deepest corporate insecurities were touched on, and rather than see them for what they are, speak to them comfortingly and confront them within ourselves, we were enticed into age old patterns of behaviour which acually prevent us becoming the true gift amongst nations that we could be. You see, in my opinion, the invitation to the UK was (and actually continues to be) this: Firstly, let’s admit it – we’re scared. There is too much going on in the world that makes us feel out of control. We need a sense of comfort and security and we’re not sure how to get that anymore, without shutting our borders and taking back control over our ‘own laws and money’. This is exactly why we need the friendship and help of our neighbours! Secondly, we need to hear the call to us that we are loved, actually (!) and we can therefore allow ourselves to be still and know that safety is not truly found in better barriers and bigger weapons but in the risk that is relationship, vulnerability and being known…..that somehow underneath everything are the ‘everlasting arms’. Thirdly, this allows us to find a new place in ‘just being’, knowing we have inherent value, becoming truly loayal friends to the rest of Europe and the World, without the need to re-establish our status as the ‘Great One’.

 

Yes, the media holds an enormous amount of power, but it was the appeal to our deepest needs, a root struggles that enevitably lead to Brexit. Those, who felt the pull to remain, needed to speak to those very same issues, whilst calling us not towards our ‘3’ need to be Great and Successful, but towards our ‘9’. We must awaken the imagination of these amazing isles to a new place in the world, that is not about reassesrting our own name as Great, but finding our place as a nation of peace, building an altogether different kind of future in which our work does not look to protect our own future and rights, but the future hope of everyone everywhere. The UK has some incredible gifts and we can be a gift within and among the nations. We need a world in which each nation knows it’s inherent value and each can take their place amongst the nations to build a future for generations to come, in which we live in peace. We need to reimagine our place in the world. We need to tell a new and more ancient story. In order to do so we MUST face up to our own shadow, otherwise we will continue to act out of it and be the very antithesis of what we would, in our heart of heats, love to become.

 

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What Lies Beneath?

Do you sometimes wonder what is really going on? As the furore around the planned 5-day strikes by junior doctors unfolds, with all the clamour and the noise, the positioning, the power plays, the arguments and the counter-arguments, I wonder where is the truth amidst the madness? How have we reached a stage in which the government and an army of medics, surgeons and psychiatrists are at such loggerheads? What lies beneath all of this?

 

Theresa May, our Prime Minister tell us that “doctors have never had it so good” – I wonder when she last shadowed a Senior Registrar for Acute Medicine on a Friday night in an understaffed hospital? Jeremy Hunt tells us that he is a modern day Aneurin Bevan (I wonder what AB would think of that?!), whilst his shadow counter-part, Diane Abbott retorts that this is a ridiculous suggestion. The PM and the Secretary of State for Health both agree that the junior doctors are playing politics, something the other side refutes, but all agree that this is a disaster and patients lives may well be put at risk. The right wing press tell us it is all about pay and that the doctors are being greedy, whilst the left wing press tell us it is all about an underlying agenda to privatise the NHS. The Junior Doctors admit that some of this is about pay (who would want a significant pay cut for working long and unsociable hours?) but that it is more about resisting a policy to deliver a 24/7, 7/7 NHS, which they believe to be unaffordable and unstaffable due to shortages in funding and recruitment. Senior colleagues appear to be split down the middle in terms of support for the strikes, patient groups are understandably concerned and yet a solution does not appear to be forthcoming.

 

Shouting, anger, fighting, noise, name-calling, power-plays, hate and hollering. So, who will seek the welfare of the people and the nation? Who will make for peace? Both sides tell us this is what they are doing and this is why they stand their ground. The government apparently want to deliver the same standard of service throughout the 7 day week. The Junior Doctors say they are the ones really standing up for the people by resisting that which is unsafe and unfair.

 

So, let us learn from the peacemakers to find a way through. In apartheid South Africa, peace was not reached through hate and vitriol. It took deep courage from men and women to expose lies, to speak truth to power, but most importantly to tell their stories. It was not about the one man, Nelson Mandela, but the many together waking up to an alternative future that was fairer for everybody. In the battle for civil rights in the USA, a nation was awakened to the reality of injustice within its own borders. The story of one woman, Rosa Parks, who refused to be humiliated on a bus became a people movement as numerous as the stars, shining together for an altogether different day. In Rwanda, after the appalling genocide, those who lost everything, found a voice to communicate to their very oppressors, those who had raped and murdered their own families, not only their story, but forgiveness for the atrocities caused and found a way through to a new future. If we want peace and a better future for everybody, then we need to face up to our reality, be willing to really listen and then find that together we can embrace a new future.

 

We have an apartheid of globalisation and free market capitalism across the entire world. Every day, the gap between the rich and the poor is widened. Our entire economic system, founded on the oppression of Empire through expansion (via military violence), the creation of debt (through an errant banking system) and the rule of law (held in place by the state of the exception) is no longer fit for purpose. We see it in the plight of refugees stuck between war and barbed wire fences in a land they cannot call their own. We see it in the disproportionate imprisonment of Black American males in the USA. We see it in the vile island detention centres of Australia. We see it in the slums of New Delhi, the townships of sub-Saharan Africa and the Favelas of South America – in the eyes of children dying from such ridiculous things as diarrhoea and starvation. We encounter it in the streets of Athens and the public squares of Madrid. And yes, we find it in the midst of our NHS and social care system. Our world as we have known it is broken and no matter how much sticky tape or wrapping paper we apply, the centre simply cannot hold. The core is unstable. Everything is shaking. We must have the courage to let go of what we have known and embrace an altogether different future, a future that is fairer for everybody, where things don’t simply trickle down to the poorest, but in which the balances are re-set.

 

We have become slaves of the ‘free market’, fodder of the beast that requires ever more of us. What lies underneath the row over Junior Doctor pay and the forthcoming strikes is a great gaping hole that scares the hell out of many of us. Oh, we can sling mud until the cows come home, but it’s not going to get us anywhere. Top down, pyramidal, heroic leadership that stays its course and demands it’s own way is simply not going to cut the mustard. We must have some brave and difficult conversations about the detrimental effects of making policy from the safety of ivory towers, and learn to really listen to the stories of those affected. We have so much to learn from the Leeds Poverty Truth Challenge, the Homeless Charter in Manchester, the Community Conversations in Morecambe Bay, the Cities of Refuge initiative, the Civil Rights movements, the Mediation work done in Rwanda…..we don’t have the answers right now. The problems facing the NHS are fare more complex than trying to ensure an undeliverable manifesto promise is outworked. We need humility on all sides, collaboration and partnership.

 

It goes deeper than people right across the UK needing to manage their own health and wellbeing more effectively. It is more complex than needing to recognise where there is waste and dealing with it. It isn’t just as straight forward as needing to talk about chronic under-funding and under-recruitment. We face an existential crisis, an ontological question about the future of humanity together. Resting back onto familiar ways of operating or antiquated leadership styles will simply not work for us any more. The black hole we face is either a death or the opportunity for re-birth. A squeeze that will force us into something new. We can’t keep dancing around it forever. We must take the plunge, accept that there is no going back and see what new creation we might just co-create with Love on the other side. Don’t be afraid…….there is light at the other end of the tunnel.

 

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