When my children were little kids, we had two dogs. One was a cross-breed — a combination of bearded collie, border collie, labrador and spaniel — and the other was a wolfhound.
The cross-bred dog only came up to the height of the top of the wolfhound's legs; but, as they say, "It ain't the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."
When anyone called at our house, the dogs would come to the door with me. Freya (the wolfhound) would just stand there looking calm and interested, but Mary (the little collie-cross) would bark.
And the caller would assume that what had happened was that the wolfhound barked at them.
I think this must have been because they saw a big dog as somewhat threatening, and a barking dog as somewhat threatening, and they clumped them together and categorised them as one threatening thing. They stayed inside their own opinion/perspective/viewpoint, instead of remaining objective enough to notice what was actually happening.
So it is that many people find it difficult to distinguish between facts and opinions. If you can be bothered with it, there's a very good instance of this in a video about British politics that I'll put at the bottom of this post.
The man in it is talking about a hiatus to a proposed change for local political regions. Briefly, we had boroughs (relatively small, town-sized regions) and counties, each having their own council — so in Hastings we have a borough council for Hastings and St Leonards, divided in to smaller neighbourhood wards each with there own councillor, but we also have the East Sussex County Council. It's all rather tedious because (for instance) the county looks after the roads, but the borough has to deal with endless complaints about the roads and a lot of councillor time is taken up trying patiently to explain to unconvinced residents that they're complaining to someone with no jurisdiction over the problem in question.
The new proposal from central government is for larger regional authorities, each having a presiding mayor. Many of us in Hastings have been looking forward to this, because our town is very poor (though well-managed) and other parts of East Sussex are a lot richer. We hoped that by joining together with them, we would be part of something better resourced, with size giving us the benefit of streamlined costs (only one set of accountants, auditors, planning consultants, health authorities, etc). Our borough councillors consulted the local residents, gave us various options to choose from, publicised the consolation, gave us every opportunity to have our say, and the majority voted for the change to a bigger regional authority.
It's also worth saying that Hastings is quite a hippy places with colourful pagan festival, a big arts scene, predominantly Green politics, and a heavy emphasis on inclusion — religious, sexual orientation, trans issues, all of that — despite which we have a superb treasurer who is no hippy, has his feet on the ground, and keeps us on a realistic fiscal base that helps us thrive. We voted him in. Hippies are not necessarily stupid.
Now in the video below, using many such words as brilliant, awful, good, bad, etc, the video man is rejoicing that this change to bigger regional political districts has been put on hold by central government.
He says this will save us money — it won't, we've already spent millions because we're well into the transition. He says the people who want the change are anti-democratic and want money and power for themselves, not for the people. Certainly in our borough, this is the opposite of what is the case. He says that all the mayors will be like Sadiq Khan (the mayor of London); well, they will in the sense that they will all be mayors, but they won't necessarily be like Sadiq Khan — we'll get who the majority vote for. He says the mayors will waste money on their own pet project and he cites trans pride processions as an example. But we already have such projects rolling big time in Hastings, and the people seem to enjoy it. We'll probably get less of that from a mayor elected by a wider demographic than our bonkers artsy Green Hastings-world.
In fact just about every single thing the man in this video presents as fact is in actuality his opinion. Most of it, if you look at Hastings, is (in our area at least) demonstrably incorrect.
How intriguing. Because I don't think the man in the video is (intentionally) lying. He speaks with great conviction and I think he is saying what he absolutely believes to be true.
On the one hand this feels somewhat frustrating, but I think it's also quite restful. It's like the Taoist farmer story — "Maybe yes, maybe no" — it means that what is (daily) presented to us as awful, bad, catastrophic, greedy, selfish and evil (private landlords, for example), may not be so at all.
There is peace in this. It means that, though we should remain vigilant, watching and listening with real attention, it is probably unwise to take to the streets or shout slogans and carry banners. As a wise person once said, "The things we worry about will probably never happen, but things will happen that we didn't expect; so we're probably worrying about the right amount but about the wrong things."
It also means that it is unwise to clump things together, to create categories (as callers to our house did with our dogs). Things are what they are, very individual, categories are almost meaningless.
Sometimes people categorise me and my husband into one undifferentiated unit. They assume that because we are married, we think the same thing (I know this by listening to what they say to us). And they make class assumptions about us, too. So there is an assumption that we are rich enough to go on holiday because we speak like educated people; that he is interested in Taoism and Celtic spirituality because I am; That we share the same theological outlook and vote for the same political party, and so forth. None of these things is true.
Something I am really looking forward to is the publication of my husband's first novel. Because he has worked in Christian publishing, was a Green Party councillor for the borough, is supportive of other people even (sometimes) when he doesn't agree with them, and is an irenic spirit who avoids arguments, people think they know him. They don't. My husband is surprisingly hard to get to know. But when he begins to publish the fiction he has been writing, it will be a chance for his true voice, his own voice, to be heard. I wish everyone would write a book, so every voice would have a chance to be heard.
Anyway, this is getting too long so I'll stop now. Here's the video. The man in it is hard work but curiously fascinating in his inability to distinguish fact from opinion, and grasp that other people see things differently. Politics, eh?
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