The Satisfaction Problem

The Financial Times recently offered five reasons why Britain has burned through seven prime ministers since 2016: Brexit, individual mistakes, economic sluggishness, MPs’ rebelliousness, and the media. Their diagnosis, though, was wrong. One does not need five reasons to explain the political turmoil that has characterised Britain's last decade. One will do: technology.

Why such polarisation? Why such dissatisfaction with politics, and such little faith in the future of our nation? Why is it that nobody – with any honest recollection of the past ten years – has more good things to say than bad about any of those seven prime ministers? The FT treats each departure as a discrete event with discrete causes. May fell on Brexit; Johnson on his ethics; Truss on the bond markets; Sunak on an election that had already been decided before he called it; Starmer on a party that had already found its next leader. All true. But to stop at the particular is to mistake the symptoms for the disease.

Britain's political disarray is no longer an anomaly – it is the result of long-term corrosion.

Technological advancement has produced three things simultaneously: an increasing self-awareness of individual worth (or the conspicuous lack thereof); an expectation of perfection; and an immense availability of information that depicts the world in a state of permanent catastrophe. It is the simultaneous exposure to mass crises, and the projection of unattainable standards of perfection, that enables theoretical knowledge to exacerbate our tendencies to overthink. And that only encourages cynicism.

We have always lived in unprecedented times; only modernity has convinced itself that this one is terminal. Yes, the media is dominated by war, famine, sexual assault, and nuclear brinkmanship, but has the world actually become more threatening? I think not. 

Fifty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, literal world destruction seemed not merely conceivable but highly probable. Little over a century ago, around twenty million people died in what was then called the war to end all wars. We are orders of magnitude safer now than we were a century ago, and yet – as Jean Twenge documents in iGen – measurably more anxious because we are more aware of everything that could still go wrong.

The self-awareness, expectation of perfection, and availability of catastrophic information are a lethal combination – the very combination that, worryingly, underpins much of modern thought. And that despair-ridden personality matrix, which seems to have infected most of modern life – as Jonathan Haidt showed in his The Anxious Generation – can be traced directly to the news media. 

The media, in pursuit of virality, reinforces extremity. The amalgamation of media and news into a single force – despite the former being subjective and the latter supposedly objective – has fundamentally altered the relationship between people and politics. In its desire to reach the dizzy heights of the viewer league tables, social media-infected news has become reactionary, promoting sensationalism over substance. Combined with an ambient anti-establishment bias in much of the mainstream media, distortions of the truth become the norm. And those distortions have become so ingrained that we fail to appreciate how much of what presents itself as a news article is, in fact, wholly reliant on its author's worldview – which is to say, not objective at all.

News used to represent facts. Now it is an appeal to our ever-shortening attention spans. Clouded by blind conviction and a structural absence of critical thinking, young people accept opinion as fact. Consider the headlines of recent weeks: “Mark Carney says Canada ‘at war’ with US over trade”, “Russia using North Korean missiles to strike Ukraine, Zelensky says”, “World’s oceans hit hottest temperature on record in August”. It is no wonder people are disillusioned with politics. Political interactions have become sources of entertainment more than they reflect any desire to change society for the better. To rally behind a political issue represents a craving for community – a desire exacerbated by COVID-19 lockdowns – often without any basic knowledge of the issue itself. The result is that political engagement has morphed into the consumption of preferences rather than an engagement with reality.

An electorate that consumes politics rather than participates in it cannot indefinitely sustain the institutions that define our country today. Democracy is not a universal given. It is historically contingent – it grew out of literate, text-based societies in which the written word forced people to rely on logic, to slow down, to refine. In feudal societies, power was conveyed through spectacle: the visual, the emotional, the awesome display of extravagance. You did not reason your way into deference; you felt it. We are, in certain respects, moving back in that direction. As literacy quietly declines and attention spans contract, the conditions that once made democratic participation possible are being eroded from beneath us, without ceremony and largely without comment.

Yet the media’s addiction to extremity has had concrete political consequences: in latching onto Trump's more outlandish claims, for example, left-wing news sources actually allow Trump to pursue his immediate political interests with less scrutiny and less congressional interference. We are, in other words, inadvertently enabling the very politicians we purport to hold to account. Less attention to the invade-Greenland headline; more to the policy changes that have quietly followed. The media that claims to resist him is, in fact, his most reliable alibi. 

It is no wonder, then, that populism is rising. Voters are voting against politicians rather than for them – for the lesser of two dissatisfaction evils. Satisfaction is too easy. Satisfaction is uneventful. Satisfaction, ultimately, puts the media out of a job. And so we live in a permanent state of managed unease and discontent. 

The Financial Times is right that something structural has gone wrong with British politics. Where it errs, though, is in treating five symptoms as five separate problems with five separate causes. 

Britain’s political disease is a single one, and it predates Brexit, predates Johnson, and will outlast whatever the next set of structural reforms proposes to fix. Until we reckon honestly with the media environment that makes political satisfaction structurally impossible – not just for Britain, but for every democracy wired to the same machine – we will keep counting prime ministers instead of understanding why we keep losing them.

Image: Unsplash/Bank Phrom

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