Lord Davies Of Stamford On Brexit:"The Greatest Enemy... Is Complacency, Is Self-Delusion"

“Anybody who has been involved in a negotiation knows, or ought to know, that the greatest enemy you have really is complacency, is self-delusion. The tendency to underestimate the challenges, to underestimate the obstacles you face, to underestimate the strength of the bargaining power of the counterpart with which you are dealing and to overestimate your own.” — Lord Davies of Stamford

Alan: I've excerpted the above video from an article by freelance thinker, James Barrett:

"The Far Right and Magical Thinking"

The political far right has had a long historical relationship with magical thinking. This article explores the connections and implications of the belief that thinking it makes it real by extreme rightwing figures from the 1930s until today."

https://medium.com/@JimBarrett/the-far-right-and-magical-thinking-fe8541dc5d91

In the middle of "The Far Right And Magical Thinking" Barrett refers readers to the political triumph of Donald Trump and simple expedient of crystallizing fear around "Chicken Little's" assertion that "the sky is falling."

"Donald Trump has masterfully exploited this American tendency to embrace unreason and ignore facts. In doing so, he gains support from the powerful forces that benefit from the promotion of magical thinking and solidifies the votes of those groups whom he seems to champion, at least in the short term. This same selling of simple idea based on pandering to the individual ego, either through mysticism and nationalism (e.g. the specialness of being British and the Brexit movement) was critiqued in the first Disney cartoon telling the tale of Chicken Little in 1943:

Barrett concludes his essay with a passage from Hitler's propaganda master Joseph Goebbels:

"To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall." 

(Joseph Goebbels, Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the “Hochschule für Politik”, a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin),

Populism - and its fraternal twin, Nativist Nationalism - are, by definition, popular political phenomena. 

But "the people," the populace - der Volk - are not sufficiently educated to realize their manipulation by self-seeking (if not solipsistic) populist leaders who insure that the populace will, at the end of the "trickle down" day, find itself at the end of the garden path. 

They go down this path willingly, optimistically, and believing their cause is just. 

But fundamentally der volk fail to realize that "their" cause is not their cause, rather that they've been coopted by bad men and bad women who, paradoxically, are eager to engage "Magical Thinking" -- thinking that oligarchy/plutocracy is the best and only viable way for realists to make "good deals."

And so, Brexit looks like a good deal.

Trade wars which are "easy to win" look like good deals.

And, in the end, the subversion (and often the destruction) of democratic institutions redounds - in their "magical" minds - to "the greater good" whereby autocrats make the decerebrate masses "tired of winning" at the very moment they're losing it all. 

Ted Bundy: Why Half The Nation Goes Off The Deep End, Taking Complete Leave Of Their Senses

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/11/no-joke-half-nation-has-gone-off-deep.html

"Education" And "Instruction" Are Antipodes

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/04/education-and-instruction-are-antipodal.html

Reprise: Trump Is The Symptom Of A Broken Educational System. 

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/03/reprise-trump-is-symptom-of-broken.html

"Confirmation Bias And The Power Of Disconfirming Evidence"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/05/confirmation-bias-and-power-of.html

Compendium Of Best Pax Posts On Psychological Projection And The Psychological Shadow

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/compendium-of-best-pax-posts-on_14.html