Fulfilling our need to belong to something worth belonging to

Here’s how it goes. No. Strike that. Here’s how it always goes. The pattern is immutable. Ireland collides with something bad.

It doesn’t matter precisely what the bad thing is, although it tends to be an economic downturn or one of its variants, such as, for example, an exploding property bubble. A general election ensues or coincides, and a political party or a coalition of political parties gets into power.

The new crowd get into power in large part because they have done what they’re supposed to do in Opposition: scratch the electorate where they itch by telling them that the current Government has become arrogant, detached, uncaring, crooked, tired, and tiresome.

But there’s more to Opposition communications than that. Opposition communications, no matter which party is doing it, is always infused with a few winning characteristics. The first two are risk and passion. Put Government people on a TV programme with Opposition people and if you turn down the sound, you can still work out within seconds which is which. The Opposition lads and lassies are alive, accusatory, glowing with promise. They’re risk-takers, and TV loves risk-takers, so they get more meaningful time.

To define ‘meaningful time’, let us make reference to one of the idiotic things that happens coming up to every election, which is a frenetic and utterly fruitless emphasis on media ‘balance’. Focus on this chimera fills the gallery of every TV station during major news and current affairs programme with political apparatchiks looking, not at the programme, but at their stop watches, as the technology registers the number of seconds of airtime vouchsafed each individual on the show.

Of course, you and I know that if you put Mad Max the Opposition Man up against Pompous Patricia the Government speaker and ensure each gets precisely the same amount of airtime, Mad Max the Opposition Man is going to knock hell out of Pompous Patricia anyway, because Opposition speakers instinctively meet the needs, not of the stopwatches, but of the invisible thermostat every good presenter and producer is born with. The one that says “ooh, we have a live one here”. The one that registers emotive language. The one that senses a fight brewing, and one fight, in TV terms, is worth three lectures about policy.

The Mad Maxes are even better if they’re coming into politics for the first time, because if that’s the case, their lexicon won’t have become clogged with big grey words and phrases such as “infrastructure”, “balance of payments”, “transparency and accountability”. They talk singular, not plural; specific, not conceptual; people, not policy; stories, not statistics. This kind of communication works every time. It never fails to work. It works because, since the first human stopped dragging their wrists along the ground and began to try out words as a means of connecting with the other human in the cave, those are the means of communication that never fail.

They never fail, even in good times. In bad times, of course, when choices diminish and survival becomes the overriding option, the focus of the listener/viewer/reader/elector tightens. If it looks as if Ireland could face an exodus of big companies so that most of its citizens would end up broke, jobless and without a future; if it looks as if the country cannot pay to keep hospitals open, trains running and fire brigades ready to douse an inferno if it looks inevitable that this will lead to rioting in the streets, rats running between uncollected garbage bags, and families living off hoarded cans of beans, then that’s a pretty big dragon ripe for slaying. If the incoming Government says “slaying this one will require you to be poor for a while” the electorate signs up for what it believes to be temporary poverty.

When, in 1943, Abraham Maslow published his seminal Theory of Human Motivation, he put what might be called the “dragon” needs at the broad bottom of the pyramid of human requirements. Down at the bottom, first and foremost, came the physiological needs of every human: something to eat, something to drink, something to wear to keep out the killing cold. Next in line came shelter and security — somewhere to live. Only thereafter come needs such as self-actualisation — the urge to write a book, paint a picture or, in some other way, leave one’s mark on the world.

Once survival fears are removed, humans move quickly on. They begin to focus on other needs. That’s what happens in the wake of an economic disaster. In the beginning, everybody concentrates on simple survival and politicians meet with almost universal approval when they talk of making tough decisions. That consensus withers within the electorate more speedily than is ever expected by new governments.

When the opposition turfs out the incumbents and becomes the Government, they experience a brief period of tolerance within which all the newcomers have to communicate is this simple message: “We’re on it. We’re working hard. We know what we’re at.”

That cannot last long, because once the populace becomes confident again that the first needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are going to be met, the populace moves on. As does what used to be the government, which regroups in opposition.

New governments fall in love with the processes leading to policy delivery. They begin to talk of processes like austerity as if they were an end in themselves, an objective, rather than a tool.

This is the point at which the real disconnect happens; where governments talk of progress in terms of billions, while voters are experiencing miseries in single figures. It becomes spreadsheets versus individual need. The disconnect doesn’t mean that governments have become arrogant or uncaring, but it sure as hell looks that way, especially to media, which cares about single human interest stories rather than statistics of economic progress. This creates further impetus to the vicious circle as government communication specialists end up shouting at editors, producers, and reporters for the tone and ferocity of the questioning to which their bosses are subjected. In the process, they fail to meet a central human need.

People need to believe in something bigger than themselves. Nobody rates their life or their nation on an ISO9000 basis. We don’t want to be merely compliant. We want to be the best, the most envied, the most admirable.

We want to stand for something and to stand with others for that something.

Whoever ends up as leader of the Labour Party and whoever is on the front bench after the rumoured reshuffle need to realise that, while reducing the emphasis on austerity may diminish immediate public fury, that’s all it will do. They need to fulfil the essential human need to belong to something worth belonging to.