The Outsider Syndrome

When people are kept away from where key decisions are made about their lives, they might put up with it so long as everything seems to work to their satisfaction.  But problems inevitably surface, and circumstances are always liable to change in unexpected ways.  Then those on the outside begin to suspect that the people with decision-making powers don’t have their interest at heart at all.

 

Convinced that their concerns are overlooked, and their views persistently ignored, many end up developing the Outsider Syndrome.  First of all, they lump everyone with political authority together as the untrustworthy ‘establishment’.  It does not matter how misleading such sweeping generalisations can be, they refuse to differentiate politicians and public officials who are dedicated to helping the people from those who are corrupt, self-centred, or idle.  If they hear that one politician has done something bad, they blame all politicians regardless of the good many politicians have done.  They say none can be trusted, and all those in positions of authority must be treated with disdain.

 

Next, they start to exhibit one of two possible symptoms.  They are either consumed by a cynical apathy which leads them to think only about themselves and dismiss the common good as illusory, or fired up by an iconoclastic fury that wants to get rid of what is in place and replace it by some glowing beacon of a ‘great new era’.

 

Finally, they play their part – through abstaining from the electoral process, or giving their support to some supreme ‘outsider’ who will turn everything upside, give back ‘control’ to the people, and make their country ‘great’ again.  We have seen how this works out with a variety of ‘populist’ surge.  

 

The Outsider Syndrome is symptomatic of a malfunctioning democracy becoming ever more vulnerable to falling under arbitrary rule.  It cannot be dealt with by giving a few who were left outside the ‘political mobility’ to gain political office, for the wider problem of civic exclusion would remain for others.  The only way to overcome it is by means of bridge-building – connecting people with their own governance.

 

Apart from improving electoral processes so people have more a chance to assess candidates and make their votes count in a more proportionate manner, there are many ways to displace the insider/outsider barrier with sustained cooperative interactions.  For example, more decisions can be passed to multi-stakeholder cooperatives to make via inclusive arrangements; more issues can be considered and resolved by either all those affected through deliberative engagement (such as Planning for Real, Participatory Budgeting, or community conference), or a randomly selected jury-like group , whose views are communicated to others; and a systematic rotation of holders for public office can over time give everyone a chance to experience the power and responsibility of having statutory authority.

 

Evidence reviewed in the book, Whose Government is it? the renewal of state-citizen cooperation, shows that people can have a meaningful role in governing themselves if the appropriate techniques and support are put in place.  We need to act on that evidence more urgently than ever.

Political Epistemology: 4 approaches compared

Political epistemology is concerned with how society is to deal with the problem of conflicting knowledge claims.  What people take to be true has implications for themselves and others, and can lead to greater wellbeing or serious harm.  A society’s system of governance needs to adopt a position on how the validity of claims is to be assessed if there is to be any collective means to determine what warrants belief, what is to be rejected as false, and what cannot be settled for the time being.

Although relatively little attention is paid to political epistemology, there are four de facto approaches that influence how society responds to disputes over veracity:

 

[1] Absolutism

The absolutist approach considers any dispute to be resolvable with one definitive answer that can be supplied by an unquestionable authority. As for who is to be designated the ‘absolute authority’, that is to be determined by those who can secure a sufficiently dedicated following.  Under theocratic regimes, those who claim to speak for ‘God’ will present themselves as the ‘absolute authority’.  Totalitarian regimes, from Marxist to Fascist ones, will hand the absolute position to the leader of their one-party state.  Populist cults may regard the likes of Trump as the beacon of truth.  While philosophers such as Plato would deem only those as wise as they to be qualified to be the ultimate authority.

 

[2] Scepticism

The sceptical approach declines to resolve any disputes over truth claims.  It does not accept that there can be any basis for differentiating the veracity of any claim from any other.  Whatever people believe, whatever happens as a result of their beliefs, it is simply how it is and there is no rational basis for repudiating any claim in favour of any other.  Anarchists and laissez faire advocates embrace scepticism in their rejection of any overriding political rules and systems that may adjudicate between true and false, or right and wrong.  People are to be left to believe and act as they wish, and no one has any authority to judge them for it.

 

[3] Relativism

The relativist approach leaves the issue of settling disputes to any group of people who would agree to a system of settling such disputes.  If there were ten different groups each with their own system, then the decisions of each is correct relative to that group.  There would be no scope for deciding which of the ten is correct, unless they all sign up to a system that will operate for all of them.  Free marketeers thus want businesses to form their own voluntary rules and reject regulatory oversight.  Nationalists want ‘their’ countries to do as they choose without being bound by any international law.  And there are families that want to treat/mistreat their children in their own ways without any intervention from social services.

 

[4] Experimentalism

The experimentalist approach holds that claims are vacuous unless they assert something that is objectively discernible; and any objectively detectable feature can be checked in time through observation and investigation.  The gathered findings can be tested experimentally through further examination of reports and evidence.  Any system that can demonstrate its efficacy in carrying out experimental assessment of claims has to the extent the authority to be the adjudicator of conflicting claims in that field.  Decisions are universally applicable, but they are also provisional in the sense that they could be revised, subject to future discovery of relevant evidence.  Advancement of science and technology, legal reforms, development of techniques in arts and craft, all follow the experimentalist approach in testing, learning, and adapting to move gradually closer to more reliable ideas and practices.

 

In Conclusion

In politics, all too often we are taken in by absolutism, scepticism, or relativism, and end up allowing the most erroneous claims to steer policies that shape society.  If we are to move forward in line with what genuinely warrants our belief, we cannot afford to shrug off epistemological questions.  Instead, we should learn more about the experimentalist approach and apply it to how we want our society to be governed.

 

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For more on political epistemology, see What Should Citizens Believe:

(paperback version): https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Should-Citizens-Believe-Exploring/dp/1548183105

(kindle version): https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Should-Citizens-Believe-Exploring-ebook/dp/B07CSYRF8H