Don't Trust the Numbers - it's time to figure it all out by ourselves, by Thomas Harding

As soon as Theresa May called the UK election everyone started talking about a power grab and the inevitability of a landslide victory for the right wing. This article by my colleague Thomas Harding was written before Macron settled the question for France two weeks ago, but is highly relevant for us in the UK now. We can't let the pollsters do the work for us. We are going to have to figure things out for ourselves. 

Last week Jarvis Cocker, in his address to the Convention on Brexit (May 12th, 4pm), suggested that we might cancel this general election and hold a public enquiry instead. I laughed with relief. Yes! Someone really should find a way to do that. To find myself called for the second time in a year to lend credibility to what is fast becoming a travesty of democracy is almost enough to make me want to spit. From a certain perspective, this so-called election is in fact the second referendum that the Prime Minister has told us we can't have (assuming you want to go through all that again!). It comes in the place of a second referendum, and will be read as if it were a second referendum and yet it is being staged with all the trappings of a general election. It will have effects in the distribution of power in the House of Commons, which in turn could find itself with carte blanche to seriously reconfigure the country.  

It requires a huge amount of wily work from the electorate these days to really understand where we are and how we are being called to play our part. It is simply not possible to sit it out and sulk, we have to overcome our aversion to being called to act – and acquiesce – in a lie, and try to think how best to deploy our resources in a fast-changing scenario. The Convention on Brexit deployed the strap line 'think anew, act anew', a phrase from Abraham Lincoln; thinking and acting are definitely going to be needed, which is why I think this article is worth recycling here and now. It is very lucid, informative, and touches on points of recent history that are well worth revisiting. Thanks, Tom, for your permission to post this, and thanks to PIPOL 8 for the call for contributions that caused him to write it.

Don’t Trust the Numbers, by Thomas Harding

Originally circulated on 22 April 2017 via PIPOL8 

as part of the “Call from psychoanalystsagainst Marine Le Pen”

At some indefinite, gut-wrenching moment, in the (very) early hours of the 24th of June, 2016, it became clear that Britain had voted to leave the European Union. I didn’t get much sleep. When the polls closed on the night of the 23rd, it seemed a pretty sure thing for Remain. [1] Ladbrokes was offering odds of 4/1, a vote to stay predicted with 90% certainty. Farage had even started to make his excuses (“it looks like Remain will edge it”). But it didn’t last long. The first results came in from Newcastle-upon-Tyne not long after midnight. [2] Remain had indeed edged it, but by a much narrower margin than anyone had anticipated: only 50.7% to 49.3%. Next up, Sunderland – Brexit stronghold. Leave scored its first decisive victory, racking up 61% to 39%. The value of the pound began its steady decline from a high of $1.5018 to a low of $1.3200 (unseen since 1982) as markets woke up to an altered reality.[3] Pollsters, predictors, prophets of all stripes had got it horrifically wrong. Panic ensued. Welcome to life in the margin of error.

Trump’s unlikely triumph followed a similar course. More people than ever before watched the results of the US presidential race being reported; about 71 million in North America tuned in on TV alone.[4] I wasn’t the only one frantically refreshing the New York Times’ website, staring in dismay as the needle on their real-time forecast dial slid from one side to the other. 84% Clinton … 56% Clinton … 27% Trump … 95% Trump … confidence evaporating with each microscopic shift. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth. No one told us this could happen! (Okay, maybe they did – but we didn’t want to hear it.[5])  Big data has forsaken us! We stood dumbstruck and impotent as the political landscape reshaped itself under our very feet. Protests immediately broke out in cities across the US. Trump’s likeness was burned in effigy. People rushed to the streets to give voice to their outrage and incomprehension. But it was all too late. Donald Trump was going to be the 45th President of the United States.

France now finds itself confronted with this same danger, lurching towards disaster, lured by the siren song of voter predictions. At least at the time of writing, most polls foresee a second round run-off between Emmanuel Macron (on 23-24%) and Marine Le Pen (on 21-22%)[6] It’s no guarantee, though – both François Fillon (on 19-20%) and Jean-Luc Mélanchon (on 18-19%) are still in contention for a spot in the second round. If it does come down to Macron vs. Le Pen, then the projected result is victory for Macron, by something like 65% to 35%. You can sense the complacency these predictions have engendered. Le Pen’s presence in the second round (and her eventual defeat) are being taken as somehow inevitable no matter who faces her. Meanwhile, voter apathy has hit an all-time high: more than 30% of French voters have said that they will likely abstain in the first round. [7] This last figure brings cheer to the far-right. MLP’s support base is more determined and disciplined that those of her opponents, and is all but guaranteed to turn out on election day (cf. Brexit, cf. Trump). What’s more, it’s by no means implausible that current polling radically underestimates her support, especially in rural areas where polls struggle to find participants. Coupled with a fractured and apathetic opposition, Le Pen’s presidency suddenly becomes a real possibility.

We have only just begun to unpack the problems that our current obsession with polling data introduce to the democratic process. The colourful charts and graphs spewed out by media companies provide us with a powerful semblant of certainty. We’re able to believe (at least until the results come out) that we really do understand our fellow citizens and that we can accurately predict their behaviour. It’s a sticking plaster that covers up an equally powerful desire not to know anything at all about our neighbours and their potentially uncomfortable convictions. What better excuse could there be to stay tucked up indoors and refuse any political engagement whatsoever (the dice have already been cast, the results determined in advance …). But it doesn’t work. Not only are polling methodologies becoming increasingly unreliable, with fewer and fewer people actually responding to surveys, but it’s simply not possible to short-circuit the political process with statistics.[8] There’s too much at stake to sit back and abstain. It’s time to face up to the fact that our confidence in big data is horribly misplaced, to give up on our faith in numbers, and act.

Democracy is a fragile thing. It’s not often today that we think of it as such. Fukuyama’s belief in liberal democratic capitalism as the end point of the historical process now seems more infectious than we’ve given it credit for. But there’s nothing written that guarantees our democratic systems will make it through this latest onslaught from the far-right. To survive, our democracies require that the men and women who hold highest office play by a whole host of largely unwritten rules, that they honour convention and abide by protocol. Letting a monster loose in the corridors of power is the surest way to put these systems to the test – but we’re unlikely to appreciate the outcome. It’s already an open question as to whether the next US presidential election will be anything approaching free or fair. Le Pen’s victory would spell the same fate for France. MLP has already shown herself more than willing to bring the full force of the state crashing down upon her political (or religious, cultural, ethnic …) opponents. We will have to confront the toxic ideas that politicians of her tribe have unleashed, and we’ll have to do it one by one: in debate, discussion, dialogue. These are uncertain times, but there’s one thing we can bet on – if we do nothing, if we play the numbers game, then we’re going to lose.

[1] Cf. Anushka Asthana, Ben Quinn, and Rowena Mason, ‘UK votes to leave the EU after dramatic night divides nation’, The Guardian, 24th of June, 2016 (online: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/britain-votes-for-brexit-eu-referendum-david-cameron).

[2] Cf. ‘EU referendum results’ (full interactive map of results by region), Financial Times (online: http://ig.ft.com/sites/elections/2016/uk/eu-referendum).

[3] Cf. Katie Allen, Jill Treanor, and Simon Goodley, ‘Pound slumps to 31-year low following Brexit vote’, The Guardian, 24th of June, 2016 (online: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/23/british-pound-given-boost-by-projected-remain-win-in-eu-referendum).

[4] Cf. Oriana Schwindt, ‘Election Night Ratings: More Than 71 Million TV Viewers Watched Trump Win’, Variety (online: https://variety.com/2016/tv/news/election-night-ratings-donald-trump-audience-1201913855).

[5] Cf. Peter W. Stevenson, ‘Professor who predicted 30 years of presidential elections correctly called a Trump win in September’, Washington Post, 9th of November, 2016 (online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/28/professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-presidential-elections-correctly-is-doubling-down-on-a-trump-win).

[6]Cf. Wikipedia, ‘Liste de sondages sur l’élection présidentielle française de 2017’ (online: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_sondages_sur_l%27%C3%A9lection_pr%C3%A9sidentielle_fran%C3%A7aise_de_2017).

[7] Cf. Benoît Hamon, ‘Présidentielle : le débat des candidats peut-il convaincre les abstentionnistes ?’, France 24 (online: http://www.france24.com/fr/20170320-abstention-presidentielle-debat-candidats-convaincre-abstentionnistes-vote-blanc).

[8] Cf. Mona Chalabi, ‘Don’t trust the polls: the systemic issues that make voter surveys unreliable’, The Guardian, 27th of January, 2016 (online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/datablog/2016/jan/27/dont-trust-the-polls-the-systemic-issues-that-make-voter-surveys-unreliable).

The New Faces of Segregation – meeting in Paris, 10 June 2017

A colleague who lives and works in Paris, Camilo Ramirez, has organised a meeting for his group (L’Envers de Paris), which takes place in June. Although it will be in French and without simultaneous translation, he asked me to extend his invitation to everyone who might be interested,  anyone who would like to think more carefully about hatred and segregation in the context of the recent history of Paris. Here is the blurb for the meeting which I translated today whilst awaiting my turn in the analysts waiting room:

Taking an interest in psychoanalysis is a choice. Taking an interest in the darkest aspects of our reality, is a choice. Taking an interest in the exposed, ferocious, relentless, real that sows terror in unpredictable ways … is a choice. For the psychoanalytic association, L’Envers de Paris, this choice takes the form of a need to understand, especially since our city was hit in full force in the last two years. We now have a clear ‘before and after’ – we live and travel differently now than we did before.

It is urgent to look at these events again today, after the terror and the stupor have subsided, in order to grasp the structure and extract the logic from the mark they have left in the world today.  The new manifestations of hate and the death drive which are accomplished in the name of religious certainty have reconfigured the way of the world with unprecedented virulence. It is important to know whether this return of religion is the same as the one Jacques Lacan had predicted at the beginning of the Sixties, or if it obeys a new logic forged by changes in civilisation that have accompanied the passage of the century preceding ours.

The paternal regime with its tyrannical ideas and its binary thinking has collapsed and given way to hypermodernity with its ‘not all’ and the accompanying ‘unlimited’ that inevitably misleads. It is clear that this transition, far from encouraging any appeasement has given rise to new manifestations where the superego finds enough nourishment for its insatiable demand for sacrifices. Lacan had already pointed out that the advances in the discourse of science and the hegemony of capitalist discourse would cradle the new forms of segregation, a term which he repeatedly paired with another, that of fraternity: “I know only one single origin of brotherhood – I speak human, always humus brotherhood – segregation.”

How does the move from the patriarchal order to that of the band of brothers garner new forms of collective identification around a pure death wish? Does it always obey the fatal conjunction between the object and the ideal described by Freud in his Group Psychology and the Ego? Why does it favour communion or even conversion to a powerful sacrificial enjoyment? In what way can the real we touch in psychoanalytical practice shed light on these questions?

Belief is not the only domain that roots segregation. It takes shape in other in other contexts linked to migration and population displacements. It takes shape in the societal changes around sexuality and parenthood, where the folds/contours of identity harden up in the name of a political banner or shared jouissance.

So what can we expect from analytic discourse? How can we take up today what we have learned from Freud and Lacan? The ‘otherness’ that we dislike and that we reject in the Other only hides what horrifies us and that lies in the most intimate part of ourselves. This foreign zone is precisely the one that we like to locate in the threatening Other, rather than to assume it as our own obscure enjoyment. But only I can answer to this as a subject.

The study day will be build on what our clinic teaches us, and we shall enter into a conversation with our guests who will bring their own insights and reflections on these burning questions. 

Camilo Ramirez and his colleagues in L’Envers de Paris hope that you will join them at the Amphithéâtre Farabeuf, 15 rue de l’écoulé de Médicis, Paris 6^th, Metro/Bus: Odéon.

L’Envers de Paris – The New Faces of Segregation: Saturday 10 June 2017

To register go to the website www.enversdeparis.org

* The quote is from Seminar 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, which in French is, of course, L’envers de la psychoanalyse. The English translation of this seminar is by another colleague, Russell Grigg (Australia), and is published by Norton, 2007, and the quote appears on page 114.

[Blurb translated by Janet Haney]