Independence

In which I argue that independence not only an overlooked virtue, but one of the most important.

Many years ago the poet Milton wrote that the way to ensure that we reach truth in our opinions and beliefs is through a free marketplace of ideas. Milton was a brilliant poet and his idea on free speech stuck with us, via the philosopher John Stuart Mill and many others. Back then Milton was right. People lacked access to information but had plenty of time to ponder what information they did get. The restriction was on the flow of information, and the application of intelligence would do the rest if only they could get the facts to assess.

We have come to idolize the free press as a tenet of our faith in democracy and forgotten that it was intended as a means to an end. We are supposed to allow a free press in the service of truth, but now we treat a free press as a goal in itself.

The modern world is very different from Milton’s world. We have negligible restrictions on the flow of information. The restriction on reaching the truth is too much freedom: we are flooded with information. We no longer have the time, ability or inclination to consider all the information we encounter and judge its truthfulness. We have an overabundance of speech; we have fake news and our willingness to believe it.

What we need now is not the freedom to publish and publicise widely anything at all in mass media outlets, but an independent media. The best route to truth is to dispassionately consider what information you have access to, and share only facts and conclusions that this careful analysis has left standing; and for everyone else to do the same. This is how scientific literature works: researchers are expected to analyse their own findings and present a balanced conclusion with backing arguments. That’s how to find truth, which is the purpose of science. The scientific world is, of course, aware of problems with this model: of fake results, biased referees and non-publication bias. Similar problems afflict the rest of the world, but outside of science no-one seems to have categorised the problems… or even care about them. But truth is our goal even outside of science.

We need independence in publishing: articles disinterested in either side of an argument, but interested in truth. Disinterested people can still be money-grubbing mediocrities like Mark Zuckerberg or Rupert Murdoch. They can promote biased articles in pursuit of their fortunes; they can choose a side despite not caring about the directly relevant issue. It is the speech itself that must be disinterested, unbiased… independent.

Modern free speech is about producing ego-stroking tripe that serve no great purpose; articles are written to be addictive. They pander to instinctive needs, seducing us with clickbait into a brief emotional hit of curiosity, outrage or whatever other drug is being sold. Even if it is news, the story is chosen and worded to appeal to the same base(/ic) instincts. It makes us satisfied with ourselves and reinforces our opinions, implicitly telling us that we are sensible and on the right side.

The way for us really to be sure that we’re on the right side is to have our opinions challenged and to learn new facts. Even news that is new is often carefully chosen from all the possible information out there to reinforce ideas not teach us better ones; to keep people in a rut, not free them. Our inbuilt biases – ‘motivated reasoning’ – are the greatest pitfall for us; this is why ‘intelligent’ people can be more resistant to learning than less intelligent people: they are better at defending their current beliefs. They can perform complex intellectual feats but not choose sensible ways to use that ability; they have the intelligence of a computer, not a programmer. Incidentally, it’s an easy trap to fall into when portraying intelligent people: think of them as powerful tools to be used by normal people. In some stories this is a good reminder that wisdom and ability are different, but more often it’s a weird dehumanising stereotype that portrays intelligence as a disability. Most intelligent people are better at spotting whether they are being manipulated, not worse.

In what other areas, outside of a free press, might independence have value?

Law

The rule of law is the most obvious. Justice is pretty much the difference between barbarism and civilization… although even apes, monkeys and dogs have a sense of justice. Our legal system is predicated on independent judges. Judges who favour one side over another are incompetent or corrupt (or American supreme court justices, appointed for political opinions not for justice). To reach justice we let each side argue their case as strongly as they can and have the judge decide which arguments are best. We don’t trust people to be disinterested in their own cases, and we allow both sides of the argument to be presented strongly, to prevent the judge getting stuck in a rut and thinking only of one side of the case.

The French, as an example, do it differently. They have an investigating judge whom they trust to investigate the case and consider the arguments, like both sides in our combative system, and then also make a judgement.

Either way we need an independent judge. We don’t respect the rule of law any more, as I have written about before. Our judges are called traitors for upholding it. Partly, our laws no longer deserve respect. Our society is poorly regulated; we have plenty of laws in some areas that are not fully enforced, ensuring that some privileged people get away with breaking the law, and are lionized for their worldly success, while others suffer and are demonized for daring to do wrong. This judgement in enforcement is partly a necessity because of the vast underfunding of the police and the courts. In other areas, such as electoral fraud, we have insufficient law. Things that ought to be wrong have never been considered, and now that people have done them and attained power or success they use that power to lobby to be able to continue doing it and to escape opprobrium for doing it.

Sport

As in law, so in sport. There are rules, people break them both accidentally and deliberately, and we need a referee to spot infractions and decide on penalties. When the rewards, both money and glory, go to the winners, people will bend the rules just that little bit further than they allow others to bend them back. People forgive themselves most easily, and some will do whatever they can get away with. So we need people whose job it is to enforce the rules: without rules, the sport doesn’t exist any more.

And yet more and more we distrust referees. We chant about them, insult them, question their decisions and yet fear the alternative: video referees, able to see almost everything but ‘slowing the game down’. We all want the referees’ decisions to go our way; we worry about a referee who might catch everything. It never occurs to commentators that it is players’ fouls that slow the game down; we wouldn’t want to blame our own side for something bad. It is the system of judging that just takes too much time and effort: let it pass, we think… unless it hurts us.

Regulation

              Outside the realm of law there is still a murky world of regulators: organisations typically sponsored by government, but sometimes industry bodies, that have some power of judgement over their members. There are regulators for doctors, nurses, solicitors, accountants, electricity, water, elections, banking and so on. They have no real power to do any good. Their supposed ability to make judgements is unacceptable: anyone on the wrong side of such a judgement would never accept it as an unbiased, reasonable decision. Ever fearful of legal challenge, they fall back to only what the law is already very clear on. They do not guide an industry: they search for excuses. There is a big range of action that is not the absolute best, but is not demonstrably illegal. Regulators rarely dare even venture into condemning the probably illegal: if they ever bother going beyond the law, it is in the form of non-binding best practice suggestions and vague language filled with ‘unless not necessary’ and similar get-out phrases.

              This is because we do not want our judgement impinged on by a regulator. We do not trust regulators to be impartial: our own judgements are always excellent decisions, perfectly balancing needs versus desires: business necessities against aspirations. We no longer trust or care for independence.

Art

The art world is a world apart from normal people. This is the world of transnational tax-haven based buyers and sellers; Conservative party donors and treasurers, Russian oligarchs (sometimes all the same thing) and obscene prices. Art is a luxury good; people buy it to show off how wealthy they are, and maybe as an appreciating asset. No-one can possibly get £71m worth of joy from an ugly metal rabbit; or even $81m worth from Monet’s Meule. I have more beautiful photos on my wall and on my hard drive, and although I’ve visited some spectacular places, you can find photos like mine online for free.

But the art world relies on dealers; experts who authenticate the provenance of an artwork, for old masters, and who confirm a price range. The Last Leonardo, sold for £341m, was probably not by Leonardo. The authenticators get work from customers by confirming high values; only those who confirm high values progress in their careers.

Although the trust in authenticity might not be warranted, nonetheless the experts create trust in the market between buyers and sellers. Without them, the art market, where rich people launder money and swap vast sums for ugly trinkets, would collapse. In this case, that might be a good thing. But they’d find some other way, and galleries and museums would struggle to collect art of genuine historical importance.

Audit

The whole purpose of audit is to provide an independent check of a company’s accounts (or other audited information). It tells investors that they can base decisions on the information they see.  Without audit, events such as the Tesco scandal or the collapse of Patisserie Valerie wouldn’t be scandals: they’d be normal.

Beyond statutory audit, there is a huge range of professional services offered by companies and consultants that involve assuring the quality of something. Accountants and lawyers do ‘due diligence’ on suppliers, buyers and potential purchasers. We rely on solicitors to handle money for us when we buy a house, to ensure that no-one cheats someone else. This blends into regulation, and it’s a huge part of our world. We need all these people to be independent. Audit and professional services are central to the economy. And yet there are three reviews of audit, as the Big Four dominate the market and are perceived not to be independent.

Advertising

I’m not shy about how much I loathe advertising. Its purpose is to distort rational decision-making and introduce, in economists’ language, imperfection into the market. The very first advertisement might have been simply information that something called toothpaste existed, although I’m sure that traders have been lying about the products for millenia. But modern advertising isn’t about conveying information about which we can make independent decisions; it’s about playing emotions. Its aim is to destroy our independence.

This trend is most visible online. There are so many consumer goods out there that we cannot make perfect decisions about them. We can’t know everything and be sure of winnowing out the dross. We turn to websites and companies that promise to aggregate and rank the options. In exchange we pay more: curator companies charge for their services. Aggregators take a cut. And then sellers try to play their algorithms: insurance companies, for example, release a multitude of similar policies so that they clog up the front page of a search on insurance aggregators’ websites. People are then much more likely to select one of that company’s options rather than compare the genuinely different options available.

We don’t just try to find independence in companies. We return to word-of-mouth, and in the modern networked world that’s not just our friends, it’s ‘influencers’ and bloggers. We try to find people who have done the hard work of working through the multitude of possibilities and whose tastes match our own. But, in the least subtle demonstration of the corrupting influence of advertising, as soon as an influencer becomes vaguely influential, that person is snapped up by advertisers and paid to promote products, losing the independence that many people thought they had found. All that is left is the ‘entertainment’ of the person’s performance of independence: an actor pretending to be what we need.

Companies chase the holy grail of brand trust, trying to cut out the influencer middleman. But all for image: they calculate how greedy they can be whilst still keeping hold of dedicated consumers. Some aim for the very moral niche, but it’s still a business strategy.

Companies want to make us like their products without going through the hard work of making them high quality but low cost. They fund advertising, which makes us willing to buy a product for more than it is worth, and they quantify this value and call it branding, an intangible asset. If we go through the accounts of the largest companies in the world (that have been purchased, as they’re not allowed officially to account for it unless the price has actually been paid) we’ll see billions, if not trillions, of pounds worth of brand assets: a ready-made figure for how much consumers are being taken for a ride. One estimate puts it at over $4.5 trillion in the USA.

Independence in the economy

              All these examples show that independence is central to society and the economy. Without independence in these areas trust and fairness would be lost, and without trust there can be no markets, and without fairness there is no society.

              The list of regulations is huge and unimaginable, and that’s part of the problem. Until Grenfell tower block burned, very few people would have been able to mention regulations about the combustibility of building cladding, or safety regulations about how to install it. For many, the host of similar regulations is an example of government-gone-mad; the nanny state blocking good business. But we need people to check information for us, because we cannot be experts in everything in a world full of complexity. Yes, it’s true that we didn’t build an empire on health and safety regulations: ‘we’ built it on the hard work and early deaths of the poor. We didn’t need regulations when ‘we’ fought off wolves and bears with stone axes, but modern materials science is hugely more complex than chipping flints. Until recently, drowning was a very common cause of death: children who couldn’t swim were allowed near open bodies of water.

              Those lifeguards at swimming pools and beaches, and the signs everywhere else saying ‘no lifeguard on duty’ or ‘deep water: danger of death’ seem silly to adults who never knew someone who drowned, but they’re there for a reason. No-one drowns, so they seem silly, but no-one drowns… any more.

Independence might therefore seem like a good work virtue. Something to cultivate at work, and then to relax away from at home, where you can indulge in passion, drama and bias all you like. For those who hate rational thought, this might be an appealing idea. Sadly, it’s not true.

Hans Rosling points out to us, via his beautiful lectures and his book, that we are wrong about important things in the world because of our love of drama. He phrases it very well:

‘Our brains often jump to swift conclusions without much thinking, which used to help us avoid immediate dangers. We are interested in gossip and dramatic stories, which used to be the only source of news and useful information. We crave sugar and fat, which used to be life-saving sources of energy when food was scarce… our cravings for drama are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview….

We still need these dramatic instincts to give meaning to the world… we should not cut out all sugar and fat [or drama]. But we need to learn to control our drama intake.’

Drama, like fat and sugar, might be an essential ingredient for a fulfilled life, but we crave far more than we need and an excess of it rapidly causes us trouble. And like fat and sugar, it doesn’t matter if you consume it at home only: too much is still too much. You can get addicted to emotionality even if you start off abstaining at work, just as you can with alcohol.

The word ‘addiction’ might seem excessive. It’s not. We know from decades of research that emotional intelligence is hugely important to thrive in life: not just to do caring, communicative jobs, or even to earn money, but to be happy and cultivate good relationships. We are an emotional species and those emotions can control us. Some people feel bad and take it out on others, spreading pain and discontent. People feel hurt and lash out, whether the target deserves it or not. People let emotions govern their motivation, appetite, health and decisions. You can feel short of money through impulse-buying, or short of friends through lashing out.

Whole books have been written about the myriad ways in which the ability to maintain a bit of distance and be reasonable helps all aspects of our personal lives. There are even possibilities that it could help with serious disease: depression is a state of feeling the worst about life and its possibilities, and anti-depressants are known to reduce ‘affect’ (i.e. emotion). They don’t make people happy; they give them a chance to be dispassionate and see things slightly more reasonably. Some people find that this robs life of joy… but depression is a horrible condition to live through in which it’s hard to find much joy anyway. A bit of distance can be a good thing in a depressing world.

Then, of course, there’s risk management. Yet again, we have tides of research and waves of more popular books about systemic biases in human thought. The deservedly popular Thinking Fast and Slow tells us that emotional reasoning is behind some of the greatest disasters of all time. People get caught up in the mood and fail to raise, or listen to, valid concerns. A ‘can-do’, positive attitude, so widely prized across business, is actually a route to failure. Thinking about failure is the way to avoid it. That requires the ability to think independently: to be independent from team-mates, and independent from one’s own hopes and desires.

Politics

Finally, we get to the one subject to rule them all. Politics is where we make or break all the other areas already mentioned: how we exert control and bend them to our will. We live in a democracy, but it’s failing. We have made a disastrous decision recently, and we’re not the only ones. People, especially young people, feel failed by democracy and wonder if authoritarianism might be better. National leaders across the West and beyond express admiration for ‘strong’ (i.e. bad) leaders. Part of this is that the baby boomer generation has failed its successors, mortgaging the future, paying themselves massive pensions using government debt that others will pay off, and because they’re a baby boom they can get away with it. But perhaps the modern world is recognizing a greater truth:

If you want a people who govern themselves then the people must be able to govern themselves.

It reads like a tautology. But people who can’t think independently and rationally enough to control their individual actions can’t do the same for collective action either. The idea of the wisdom of the crowd assumes that we’re all making rational decisions based on limited information, not that we’re making irrational decisions with unlimited information. It is our independence that is key; introduce bias and you can skew the whole process.

Our whole society is built around introducing bias. Politicians want to make us like them as a shortcut that is easier than doing the hard work of finding solutions to intractable problems in which some will inevitably do worse than others. Everyone finds it easier to create bias than to do the hard work of being genuinely better in an independent analysis. We’re aware of this possibility: that’s why sports fans scream that the referee is biased. But we don’t consciously value independence.

In politics we have seen dodgy funding, illegal campaign funding and activity, illegal overspending, targeted advertising, barefaced lies, stonewalling to avoid real debate, all unregulated. Where things were already illegal, the law wasn’t enforced. There’s not conspiracy, I think: just foolish people unwilling to rock the boat. Many of these are already insufficiently illegal. Electoral overspending by hundreds of thousands of pounds, for example, warrants a fine that is a fraction of that amount: a minor cost of doing the work for those with that sort of money to throw around.

These things all combine around the issues of our independence, and that of our media institutions. The lies and illegality weren’t challenged enough because broadcasters feared that such independent judgement would be regarded as bias: they think that avoiding making a judgement is being independent. That isn’t true: that’s an abdication of responsibility. If all our courts refused to convict criminals, we wouldn’t call them independent. We’d say that they were on the side of the criminals. Independent requires judgement.

If supposedly respectable institutions whose job it is to assess and disseminate information can’t put out the truth, how can someone struggling to make ends meet at a demanding job and with a demanding family find the truth in his spare time? No wonder people discarded the goal of truth and decided to use what was left to them: emotion.

People are helped in this by a society that promotes emotionality. Our heroes are emotionally illiterate fools. Soap operas are cesspits of the most bilious drama, created by whole rosters of characters who belong in mental homes for the disturbed. Even in less nauseating art, the last couple of decades have fully explored the idea of the flawed hero, and even as the heroes have become super-powered, physically, those emotional flaws remain or are worse. The transformers films, or ‘Guardians of the Galaxy vol 1’, exemplify this perfectly. The transformers are super-powered toddlers who become friends with a toddler in an adolescent body. Although I’ve met more mature toddlers. Their misbehaviour and awkwardness are supposed to be funny but were just cringeworthy.

Advertisements promote impulsivity. Packaging and shop layouts are carefully designed to tempt us. Algorithms guess what we’ll want next and ask us if we want to buy it. And political messages find out our fears and promise to remove them; or our hopes and promise to achieve them. I might like half a party’s policies, making it a poor choice for me, but it will send me only advertising about that half. Not only might I never find out about the other half, but I will assume that the half I like are its priorities, because those are the ones I will perceive it to be pushing most.

Since parties rarely enact a tenth of what they promise (and of what the Conservatives promise, less than a tenth will achieve the goals they claim), I could easily vote for a party that will do nothing for me.

I will ruin my life, and my country, unless I can take back control. Not by voting for the slogan, but of my own mind. We need to control our emotional impulses and seek the truth. How will we take back control? From whom? What control? We can’t just let the truth come to us, or even treat what information comes our way with caution. We must seek the information that no-one has sent our way. When other people are in control of our information, they control our minds. We must be independent, sovereign humans of our own. Without that, all talk of freedom is wasted. We are not our emotions: we are the thoughts that control and temper the emotions.

When we have tempered our emotional selves, we will be the steely opponents that the demagogues fear. We will realize that there’s no shame in working together, as a country or international community, because our independence is internal and cannot be lost: it’s inside of all of us, waiting to save our lives.