Richard Shaw

The Persuaders and the Enablers

Friday, 28 May, ‘21

Politics, as it has evolved up to the present time, is an arena where the enablers meet the persuaders. This is really of the essence of the party political system. One party believes it has the answers and needs to persuade you that it has. It needs to do this because it needs your vote. Only then will it be able to do what it talks about.

This is what campaigning is about; also presentation. If we like what we see and like what we hear we will say ‘yes’ to it. Maybe it immediately speaks to and for our experience. We feel affirmed and mobilised. Then we really do feel ‘represented’. Or it may be there is something else we like about the Party or the Candidate. Or it’s a family tradition that we always vote for this Party.

Whatever it is, many things are at work and many things are being done to sway us.

This is fine as long as it is only raises our consciousness - makes us aware of the things that are happening and which speak for themselves. Then we are being enlightened and moved but not being persuaded. We are only being told what we already ‘know’.

But it becomes different when we are persuaded to accept somebody else’s views as if they were our own and to then act out of those views. Then the enablers become the persuaders. And you are into a different ball game.

Or as long as those who want our vote are only raising our awareness of what actually is, of what is actually there, then that’s fine. They are only helping us to see how it is. We will naturally then want them to act for us in doing what the situation itself requires.

But when techniques are used to influence us, then the enablers become the persuaders and we are in a murkier pond. We are being recruited to a cause rather than coming to it out of our own independence or being invited to follow another’s cause rather than being helped to see why and how we naturally belong to it.

As with everything else, sometimes this is a fine line. But sensitivity towards what is going on here may be a cause of increasing distrust of politicians. For whose sake are they really in this? This very distrust may make the whole thing less workable or less truly representative. There comes a point when you have to look at alternatives. And this causes you to ask ‘what would be more representative?’

It may help here to imagine a funnel: broadest at its wide rim and then narrowing down to a spout. The rim is the gathering of the different perspectives, the draw ring upon the different experiences. The spout is where this narrows to the things which are to be done. But this still represents and mobilises everything received into the wider apart.

Then you no longer have to persuade so much as allow everyone to speak out of what they know from experience. This will inevitably be partial but the truth is not found in defeating the other point of view but combining the different perspectives until you can begin to see more of the universal truths contained in the unique experience.
Then you know what to do for everyone’s sake. The ‘knowing’ becomes a ‘knowing how’.
The mobilisation this brings into effect, and the energy needed to drive it, is already there.
You don’t have to win people round or force people to accept it. They already recognise themselves within it - themselves and everyone else.

This is an enabling born of experience which respects, recognises and works with every point of view. You don’t have to recruit people to your own cause. They are already in what needs to be delivered.

And by the same token you don’t need persuasion. Whenever the need for persuasion occurs you have something of doubtful origin. The individual is being persuaded or invited to disregard or ‘overcome’ their doubts. This is always an imposition, however much it may masquerade as emancipation. It estranges us from ourselves rather than helps us to be more of who or what we already are - both as individuals and members of the community.

We are being asked to be less of ourselves, not more of our selves, albeit in pursuit of ‘a greater whole’ in both cases.

It is time to turn down the volume on persuasion and turn up the volume of enabling.

This will see us more concerned with the nature of the problem and what we do about it.

The process I envisage requires universal engagement as well as universal suffrage. As always that may need to be exercised through representatives who do most of the actual work. But we will all still be represented within it.

This will be both like and unlike what we have at the moment. I have ideas on this but would rather work with you to outline, develop and begin to implement these rather than impose them on you. Then we start as we mean to carry on.

I would happily meet with those who wish to pursue this further.

I do not seek to agitate or persuade but to take a step further towards representative enabling.