Liberalism: Implied Consent and Personal Belief

As readers would know, "Politics for the New Dark Age" lays out a socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly endorses the modern, Rawlsian version of social contract theory, which posits that members of a society can be thought of as have an implied agreement with one another that establishes the ground rules for interaction. The social contract is a thought experiment, but the fact that it is merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful. Many other social and religious systems are of course based on fictions, but that does not stop them from serving valuable public purposes. What matters in evolutionary game theory for the success or failure of a given strategy is whether it is effective, not whether it is true, or good. 

The problem of implied consent

One of the classical problems with social contract theory is its reliance on implied, or what Locke called ‘tacit’, consent. In other words, there is not a literal contract to which members of a society give their explicit agreement, but rather a tacit understanding or expectation that individual behaviour will follow social norms. We are talking less about conscious consent and more about unconscious beliefs and practices. In the sense of cultural evolution, these are stable expectations about the behaviour of the self and others. It is philosophically challenging, to say the least, to reconcile implied consent with a philosophies grounded in the free will of individuals. Politics, and other similar works, take the view that tacit consent is legitimate since anyone, upon encountering injustice, is entitled to consciously challenge a norm and work actively to change it. Implied consent requires a right to dissent. Moreover, if we ever did stop to deliberate on the rules that should govern our lives, we would, after much time and effort, settle on norms that look very much like the ones we already have.

In evolutionary terms, the establishment of the rules and norms of society by the acquiescence of its members is not difficult to understand. Rules, norms and behaviours respond to selection pressures and the most useful strategies are imitated and replicated. Evolved cultural constructs exist outside the individual, and individuals are socialised into those constructs during the process of their formal and informal education. Moreover, since evolved cultural constructs must, by definition, be adaptive (or at least, neutral) in the context of their environment, they will tend to work [fairly] well most of the time for [most of] the members of that society. Note, further to my last blog,  that putting tacit consent in evolutionary terms does not impart evolved rules with independent moral virtue: everyone is free to try different strategies, and their success or failure will determine whether the proposed change or mutation is replicated into the next generation. A great many traditional norms have been challenged with positive net results: that’s progress in a nutshell.

Norms and the Self

One of modern philosophy’s most difficult challenges, in an era in which much of what individuals believe and how we act can potentially be explained in terms of biological and evolutionary processes, is deciding the basis on which a social rule can be considered valid. We are forced to revisit age-old questions of free will and determinism. If we throw out the abstraction of homo economicus, the universally rational utility-seeking individual, what is left? Most writers exploring this area draw heavily on cognitive psychologist and Nobel Prize in Economics winner Daniel Kahneman’s work showing that humans have [at least] two different modes of thinking: ‘System 1’, which is fast and instinctive, and ‘System 2’ which is slower, more energy intensive and deliberative.

It seems to me that the future of moral philosophy will revolve around interpreting the differing moral roles played by each of these systems. Already, perspectives differ wildly. Joshua Greene (author of ‘Moral Tribes’) believes that the only possible meta-morality for a diverse society occurs when Mode 2 reasoning dominates Mode 1 instincts. Jonathon Haidt (author of “The Righteous Mind”) argues that true moral principles lie in our evolved moral tastes and that Mode 2 thinking is a trickster, which exists primarily to rationalise and justify our innate preferences (a position also contemplated by Greene is his more critical moments). John Jost’s takedown of Haidt’s book rebuts this argument well.

My own perspective lies somewhere between the two extremes. I distrust the capacity of individuals to cognitively reason their way around their instincts and towards a moral solution that is also binding on others. But nor do I accept the conservative proposition (or naturalist fallacy) that because a System 1 moral system evolved (either genetically or culturally) in the past it is also necessarily adapted to solving modern social and political problems. Instead, I advocate for a dynamic political and social system which allows, and indeed encourages, mutant strategies to throw themselves into competition with the status quo and stand or fall on their salience to the voting public. In other words, explicit System 2 innovation creates the very variation and selection pressures needed for System 1 rules to be judged adaptive or maladaptive. 

How do we know what we know?

Where does that leave the individual? How sure can we be of the correctness of our own moral beliefs, and why? Let’s think of our personal beliefs from the perspective of the implied consent principle. The instinctive systems that we are equipped with by our genes and by our upbringing work perfectly well most of the time – up until the point that they don’t. We acquiesce to our in-build moral prejudices by acting in accordance with them, and if we ever stopped to think about our actions using our System 2 capabilities, we could and would probably construct elaborate arguments and philosophies justifying them in abstract or universal terms. Our System 2 thinking also gives us the capacity to override those instincts and adjust our behaviour upon encountering contrary signals of sufficient salience.

In other words, we give implied consent to our own moral beliefs. We do have choice and free will but don't [need to] exercise it most of the time. You could probably therefore place me in the camp of the philosophical compatabilists or self-determinists.

And that is why Chapter 16 of Politics, regarding moral aesthetics, is of such critical importance to the overall argument of the book. It’s always important to recognise that while we have innate ideological preferences, there exists the possibility of making different moral choices at any time. Regardless of whether we choose to act in accordance with our instincts, or in opposition to them, the decision to employ or not employ System 2 reasoning, and how we do so, is an aesthetic or personal one about which no universal moral laws can be drawn. Morality is at its root, a subjective art.

Evolution and Consequentialism

Although only implicit in Politics for the New Dark Age, my current research interests lean heavily towards evolutionary understandings of political and social science. In short, generalised Darwinism proposes that the evolution of species, the development of individual biological organisms, and the growth and spread of cultural norms, practices and beliefs are all controlled by the same processes of variation, selection and replication. Evolutionary approaches explain the emergence of order from anarchy, of function from randomness, and of cooperation from conflict. What such an approach seeks to understand is the success of strategies or decision-rules: ideas that transform information about the external environment into motivated action. So far, so good.

Philosophical conundrums

The key component of all evolutionary approaches is selection by consequences, or as it is commonly (and inaccurately) known, survival of the fittest. Strategies that are effective (or neutral) relative to their peer competitors will survive or even expand their frequency in the next generation, and strategies that are ineffective will reproduce or be copied less often. Thus, over time evolved strategies can converge on certain optimised mathematical equilibria. But doesn't an evolutionary approach to understanding social and political life then merely offer a justification for a utilitarian "ends justify the means" ethical philosophy? Since utilitarianism is the best-known school of consequentialist philosophy, isn't a model of social life governed by consequences hypocritical given my opposition to utilitarian governance and preference for liberal, democratic processes?

The short answer is no. Evolutionary models do not guarantee that strategies with the highest payoff will prevail. They suggest (at best!) that those strategies which are resistant to attack from alternatives can become dominant or 'fixed' in a population (an 'evolutionary stable strategy'). In the classic iterated prisoners' dilemma, for example, there are strategies that can perform better than the classic 'tit-for-tat' solution, by exploiting its short memory and capacity for forgiveness. But in a population-level model, exploitative strategies cannot do better than tit-for-tat in the long run, and cannot themselves work together to prevent being exploited by others.  

Many simplified or hedonistic forms of utilitarianism, predicted on the maximisation of some common currency such as utility or pleasure, do not concern themselves with the importance of procedure and social resilience to decision-making (but see "rule utilitarianism"). Often, inefficient social practices and norms make societies better off in the long run, likely because they allow competing signals to be taken into account or because they encode relevant information below the level of conscious awareness. Moreover, rapid variation in social and ecological circumstances may suddenly change the definition of fitness that a given strategy must produce. A decision rule that produce optimal results may not survive against a decision-rule that is less efficient but more robust in a variety of contexts, if the selection pressures are sufficiently strong.

What evolutionary thinking is not

There is a fundamental philosophical difference between ethics and material determinism: or in other words, between is and ought. Cultural evolution, like class analysis, may suggest what social and economic strategies ultimately prevail, but it is an entirely different question for us to ask what sort of strategies should prevail.

It’s impossible to use evolution as an ethical philosophy because the consequences of decisions can only be known as probabilistic likelihoods, and even then only poorly. Evolution is consequentialism under conditions of uncertainty: we have imperfect information about future events and our beliefs about the likely consequences of our decision-making are irrevocably tinged by our innate moral preferences and personal experiences. Under these conditions, as I have written in the past, the ethical thing to do to is to advocate for one’s beliefs as strongly possible and let the chips fall where they may. Each of us finds our own ethical should from within ourselves, and by own power and agency we can shape social outcomes to increase the likelihood of our preferred outcome. Importantly, by adding our power together with like-minded others, we can substantially change the probability of our preferred strategy becoming fixed in the population.

Two Critiques

Two critiques can be levelled against the evolutionary perspective from a progressive ideological worldview. Firstly, while an evolutionary understanding provides no ethical guidance for decision-making, it may imply that existing social norms and roles are already effective ways to govern a society. An evolutionary view can offer partial support to a conservative worldview, because any decision-rule that currently exists must be hypothesised to be effective for the society in which it evolved. Secondly, an evolutionary approach can be considered a rejection of enlightened humanism, since on its face it discounts the possibility that reason alone can improve society: it subjects human optimism about the future to structural forces of history and biology that are beyond individual control.

These critiques are valuable, but repeat the naturalist fallacy of basing what ought to be on the basis of what is. Evolved cultural norms and institutions can and should be routinely challenged by progressives using reason. Doing so creates the very selection pressures cultural evolution needs to operate - not challenging the status quo may allow poorly adapted (or unethical) norms to survive longer than necessary. Existing beliefs and practices may preserve biological or cultural prejudices that were adaptive, neutral or merely competitive in an earlier period in human history, but which have become maladaptive, harmful or illiberal today.

This goes to my earlier post about ethics, adaption and maladaption: how do we know if a particular social rule is worth preserving? We don’t! Social norms and institutions may be historically and culturally contingent; they may have no overall effect on social outcomes, or they may be maladaptive in modern contexts which they could not envisage when first evolved. The only way to know for sure is to seek to change them and see what happens.

Universalism(s) and Particularism(s)

Politics for the New Dark Age contends that the liberal social contract framework is universally applicable, even if it is not universally accepted. This goes for all variants of social contract liberalism, including socialism and capitalism. This is a controversial claim. The pretensions of an essentially Western philosophy to universality may seem paradoxical, given its roots in a particular historical and cultural context (Enlightenment Europe). Of course, no belief system is so ‘pure’: Western philosophy sojourned for a millennium in the Arab and Muslim world, and Christianity itself was an exotic import from the fringes of the Roman Empire which co-mingled its cultural teachings with a variety of other religious and political traditions along the way to dominating Europe.

The modern mind has a well-justified sense of scepticism towards utopias. The human quest for universal ethical systems has more often than not resulted in the widespread murder and enslavement of non-believers. But while universalist and utopian philosophies often overlap, they are not one and the same (utopias are subsets of universalisms). Whereas utopias rest on the enforcement of conformity, universalisms require only the promise of equal citizenship for all members of a community, regardless of race, sex, class or group identity. They carry a belief that other peoples and cultures regardless of their superficial differences can be brought together into the whole to form a society greater than the sum of its [diverse] parts.

Liberalism and Religion

Liberalism and the world’s great messianic religions are all universalist ideologies. They demand an absence of discrimination by adherents towards other adherents, and [in principle] reject hierarchial social norms that create differences between believers. They create systems of signals, rituals and trust that override the natural human tendency to be biased against out-groups on the basis of superficial differences such as skin colour or language. No ideology is perfect, of course. Universalisms have all been guilty of perpetuating racial caste, social-economic oppression, patriarchy and homophobia. Biases inherent in human nature are at best imperfectly suppressed by universal cultural constructs, not excised altogether.

As this Guardian piece articulates, liberalism has been responsible for great crimes against ‘other’ peoples and cultures, but also gave those peoples the tools to resist and claim equal rights. One could argue that the missionary religions (including Christianity and Islam) have experienced much the same. Universalist ideologies have become globally dominant because they offer everyone the possibility of enjoying full membership of a society, even if the practitioners of that ideology are often hypocritcal about to whom and how much equality is granted. And by allowing the creation of greater societies, they facilitate the large-scale social and economic organisation necessary to improve material standards of living.

Kiss it better

Universalist ideologies prosper the simpler they are. The easier it is for an ideology to incorporate cultural, linguistic and differences, and the fewer demands it makes of genetically pre-set behaviours, the easier it will enter new ecosystems or add new cultural groups to its base. Religions and ideologies mutate and adapt as they travel; the ideology that prospers the most is the easiest to understand in the widest variety of existing social contexts. Islam is considerably conceptually easier to understand and join than Christianity, which in turn is easier to understand and join than the exclusivist religions and cults that preceded it. Culturally exclusive beliefs and practices serve to bind groups together, creating markers of correlation that enabled group survival. But as the world shrinks and progress brings different societies in regular contact with one another new, more-relaxed norms are necessary to exploit the new possibilities of larger, richer and more diverse populations. The ethics that governs best are the ethics that governs least.

The advantage secular liberalism has over the world’s major religions is rooted in the fact that the social contract does not proscribe a universal common good but rather a process through which individuals with disagreements can argue yet remain bound by shared bonds of trust. Because religions concern themselves with ‘truth’, when people (inevitably) disagree on the nature of that truth or how it should be interpreted, they also create social divides and religious schisms that tear communities apart. Since liberal individualism makes the least demands upon its members, it has the easiest time incorporating individuals and groups that show considerable divergence from one another in belief and practices. Liberal institutions make together dynamic, learning societies where people can believe and act as they wish and yet still cooperate with other members of the community on the basis of mutual trust. 

Such an outcome was not inevitable. In the same way that evolution does not require that the strongest, smartest or best adapted species survive, it is not necessarily the case that the most universalist belief systems always prevails. India, for example, developed an easy-to-understand universalist belief system (Buddhism) during the Axial Age pre-BCE, but then reverted to a more complex and culturally contingent religion (Hinduism). Chinese philosophy, which shares many common themes with Western philosophy, has been able to spread widely in Asia but has not proved especially easy to translate beyond the Chinese cultural and linguistic world.

The Particularist Challenge

Human beings were successful because we are social generalists. Other hominids, including our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins, were likely bigger, smarter or better adapted to their particular ecological niches. It was our capacity to be flexible, social and to adjust our behaviour as we learned that made us the dominant species on the planet, even as others prospered in their own narrower niche. The same sort of selection mechanism underlies the philosophical disagreement between universalisms and their opposite number: particularisms such as nationalism, racial and religious intolerance, cultural relativism, and Randian separatism. What particularisms have in common is the desire to preserve localised particularities with smaller but clearly defined memberships. In other words, smaller but more specialised societies with higher levels of in-group trust and much lower trust of out-groups.

Particularist strategies can never be as successful on as large as scale as universalisms which invite the membership of all. But that doesn’t mean they can’t survive, or even prosper, for a time. Isolated enclaves of repression and conformity, which strong in-group cooperation and strong out-group hostility, can do well if their specialised mode of organisation is effective for its local context. States like Sparta may have been strong, and respected, for their time. But in the end it was the League of Athens and the Roman and Persian Empires represented the future of humanity. Very few exclusivist social and religious communities survive over historic timescales, no matter how strong their warriors, how smart their scientists or how wise their leaders. Flexibility and dynamism will always do better in the long run, because change in the physical and social environment of a society is impossible to resist without increasingly totalitarian methods. 

Liberalism: New Arguments for the Original Position (Part 2)

Politics for the New Dark Age offers a robust defense of a libertarian socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly makes use of social contract theory, a shared myth that the members of a society have an implicit agreement that establishes the ground rules for their future interaction. The social contract is of course only a thought experiment, but the fact that it is merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful. The veil of ignorance is a particularly important element of Rawlsian liberalism. The veil provides a selective structure to social contract-based ideologies by providing a metric by which social rules can be considered just. 

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that recent discoveries suggesting different modes of moral reasoning in the human brain offered one justification for the veil of ignorance story. If people have different ways of reasoning about moral decisions, then foundational, universal rules can only be constructed from those rules we all share in common, namely care (the prevention of harm) and fairness (legal equality). Today's blog post will tackle this problem from a different angle, namely game theory, mathematics and cultural evolution. 

The Darwinian Veil

Readers will have noticed passing references in both my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", on this blog to evolutionary game theory. Evolutionary game theory originated in the 1970s from the work of John Maynard Smith and George Price and has been extensively developed in the field of mathematical biology. It provides a way of understanding the dynamics of complex systems (including cultural systems) divorced from the need to explain the behaviour of all the individual participants in those systems. 

Most readers should be familiar with the basic conceits of game theory, or at least have heard of some of the basic games such as the "Prisoners' Dilemma" and "Chicken". Unlike simpler utilitarian rational-choice models, game theory incorporates the interdependence of actors' choices into its thinking. In other words, the consequences of my decisions are not simply a function of my pursuit of goal-optimising strategies, but also the strategies employed by other actors. More relevantly for modern political and economic policy, my success as an individual is not merely the result of my skill, luck or effort, but also the assistance and/or hindrance generated by everyone else. 

In the classic Prisoners' Dilemma, for example, I cannot reduce the prison sentence I receive because my sentence also depends on whether the other player chooses to cooperate with the police or not. My best strategy is therefore to 'cheat' and colloborate with authorities, leading to a sub-optimal outcome with hefty punishments for both players. In iterated [repeated] versions of game theory, players can learn from past behaviour and do more or less well depending on the strategies they adopt in response to the strategies of the other players. They can adapt and improve their strategies over time. 

Evolutionary Game Theory is distinct from traditional game theory by recognising that individual rationality is not strictly necessary for complex biological and cultural rules and behaviours to evolve. Thanks to the generalised processes of Darwinian mutation, selection and replication, behaviour rules can be functional without being designed. Rules and behaviours that reduce fitness will be selected out of the system and rules and behaviours that enhance fitness will come to dominate the social ecosystem. And because strategies can be changed by learning, imitation and innovation, cultural evolution occurs much, much faster than biological evolution.

The key insight of evolutionary game theory has been to divorce the strategy from the player. What we must look for is not the success or failure of individual players, but the success or failure [measued as frequency in the population] of strategies or families of strategies. In this way, evolutionary game theory applies the same concepts to cultural evolution that biologists apply to the evolution of species. The survival of carrier of a gene matters not at all if the gene survives and is passed on to the next generation. Both genes and memes code for strategies: they generate behaviour by processing external information into motivated action.

Perhaps the best introduction to evolutionary game theory in a social science context is Brian Skyrms ‘Evolution of the Social Contract’, a concise (110 page!) work of quiet genius. In that book, Skyrms labels this core assumption of evolutionary game theory in passing as the Darwinian Veil of Ignorance. Because it is strategies (i.e. social rules and norms) that show consistency and stability over time, not individuals, then when we’re looking for evolutionary stable social rules and behaviours the personal characteristics of the individual who performs those behaviours are irrelevant. In other words, a successful ideology can be judged by its capacity do dominate a social 'ecosystem', and not by the payoffs it generates for a given individual. 

Beyond the concepts, Skyrms demonstrates that while a pure utilitarian decision rules lead to an infinite number of possible strategies in many common games, an equilibrium strategy of fairness (which Skyrms terms approximate justice) is highly likely to be stable when those strategies compete with one another over many generations. In other words, the reason why humans value fairness and equality is not because fairness and equality have moral value in their own right, but because those are adaptive strategies necessary for a social species such as ours to be successful in the long term. 

In the ultimatum game, for example, players can offer a division of money to another player, who in turn can either accept the amount offered or reject it (denying the funds to both). Utilitarianism predicts that the strategy ‘offer [any] amount [if Dictator]’ will be stable. But game theory can demonstrate that in a population of game players, only strategies that approximate fairness will survive multiple interactions. By refusing to accept small offers, the weaker player punishes the dictator by withholding their consent from an unfair distirbution of resources. 

Given the impact of our species’ sociality on our recent evolutionary history, it’s unsurprising that we should be biologically hardwired with an instinct for fairness (an issue address in page 38 of my book), an instinct that most [but not all] cultures have rules and rituals to reinforce. By working with, rather than against, these instincts, social contract-based ideologies have an adaptive advantage in deriving rules that benefit society as a whole. 

Myths of the Old Order: Education as the Solution

This series of posts will examine myths or tropes that I hear progressives repeat in order to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. Conservatives likely have their equivalents but I don’t feel as qualified to offer critiques. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me at anthony.skews@gmail.com or on Twitter @Askews2000.

One of the classic paradoxes parties of the left seeks to understand is why so many economically- and socially-disadvantaged voters, who would have the most to gain from challenging the status quo, ‘vote against their own interests’ in supporting conservative parties. The quixotic quest by politicians to reach out to ‘working class whites’ (in the US) or ‘Western Sydney’ (in Australia) reflects profound, and justified, confusion by progressive leaders about why such a large pool of potential votes is so politically unreliable. The technocratic instinct in response to right-wing policy proposals is often therefore to try and demonstrate why those specific proposals would be bad for the hip pockets of certain categories of voter.  

"Politics for the New Dark Age" offers an alternative analysis: those with the least opportunities and facing the most day-to-day risk are pre-disposed to rely on coping strategies which lend support to leaders who offer to ease their anxieties and (re-)impose a sense of certainty and order. The right is extremely adept at exploiting fear and insecurity (often of ‘the other’) for their own ends, a solution progressives cannot (and should not) credibly employ. Instead, I argue, we should tackle the root causes of voter anxiety by levelling inequality, socialising risk and opportunity, and guaranteeing a decent quality of life for all.  

But what I often hear from well-meaning progressives in response to this paradox is that ‘educating voters is the solution’. It’s the catch-cry of Vox.com wonk types, former Obama administration officials, and the West Wing generation. Since policy-making should be done on the basis of the best available evidence and our own policy positions are so obviously correct, the reason people disagree with us is they lack the evidence or the training in critical thinking necessary to make rational political decisions. It is a strategic outlook that orthodox Marxists have criticised as educational dictatorship, and it is shared by “communist authoritarians, philanthropic do-gooders and bourgeois liberals” alike.

As examples, the left appeals to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to marshal the world’s most sophisticated  evidence in response to widespread climate denialism. We commission social research, hire think tanks and consultants to accumulate data and package it for the masses. We also go to great lengths to expand access to tertiary education, at least in part so that the next generation behaves more like us: the urban-dwelling recipients of a liberal arts education. We are less consistent on supporting other, non-university based forms of tertiary education because elites struggle to relate to the graduates of trade schools.

My argument is that, though education is a good in its own right, as a political strategy this approach is not only objectively wrong, but also actively counterproductive. The net response of most voters to contrarian facts is to ignore them. Exposure to inconvenient facts and evidence only hardens prejudices. Humans (including progressive intellectuals) use our reasoning capabilities to build arguments that support and rationalise our pre-existing biases and positions: we’re not endlessly flexible utilitarians, who change our minds based on the best available evidence. We are complex moral animals, whose behaviour and prejudices are shaped by our genes and our social circumstances in ways over which we have very little daily control.

The reason why the ‘education-centric’ approach is actively counter-productive is because it establishes a hierarchy of knowledge which emphasises the inequality of social position between those setting policy directions (with ‘education’) and those we are asking to support it (without). Since education thus becomes a marker of virtue, those without it stigmatised as morally flawed and unfit to take part in the decision-making process. Often progressives can be condescending and undemocratic elitists - and voters know it. Not only does reinforcement of social hierarchies tend to increase authoritarian and conservative sympathies amongst voters, but it has incited the backlash against elites that has so roiled Western democracies. Expert opinion against Trump or Brexit failed to convince voters to support the status quo, and a silent majority also actively rebelled against those (in London and Washington) who set themselves up as their social and educational betters.

To be fair, when pressed on this point, most progressives I know will concede that when they say ‘education’ what they really mean is ‘diversity of experience’. This is a better approach. Tertiary education (in whatever form) has value because it exposes us to diverse viewpoints on our societies and economic, and on race, gender, class and sexuality. Exposure to contextual diversity leads to greater tolerance of complexity in social identity, and more tolerance of out-groups. Such exposure calms anxieties about difference and reduces uncertainty (although it occasionally also has the opposite effect), creating positive effects for political and economic behaviour. Thus fears of immigration, famously, are not correlated with the number of immigrants in a community, but rather the exact inverse.

LGBT+ rights have advanced similarly: the war for marriage equality (still unfortunately stalemated in Australia) is not going to be won by converting educated people in cities. Social change occured in the hearts and minds of rural and suburban voters who discovered that (contrary to their expectations) LGBT+ individuals were just regular people who wanted the same things – home, family, relationships – as straight or cis- couples. 

So next time you hear a politician or activist say ‘educating people is the solution’ or that voters just ‘need educating’ or 'more information' about a particular social or political problem, stop them and ask how, precisely, they envisage that happening. We don't need to offer better facts, we need to offer better stories. And rather dismissing and devaluing the concerns of those who haven't been socialised to instinctively agree with us, we should instead listen to what they have to say.