On Denial

Time to start posting, then. I'll try to do a new post every day: I don't want this blog falling into disuse after 2 days, like all those blogs out there called 'Ramblings of a Self-Confessed Procrastinator'. Even the brilliant Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project burnt out pretty quickly. Which was a damned shame, to be quite honest.

So, to the blog. The first thing I want to blog about is a bit of an odd thing for a first blog: denial.

By now most of you will have heard about Kweku Adoboli, the UBS trader who has been arrested for allegedly losing the Swiss bank a billion quid. This morning's papers are going doo-dah about what he posted on Facebook just before he was arrested - stuff like 'I need a miracle!' or 'Reduced to watching Fox News for clues!', which makes you wonder what kind of clues he was looking for. Whatever was going through his head at the time, you get the impression that here was a man who was in the middle of a horrible panic, fully aware of the consequences of his actions, whatever those actions might have been.

What might they have been? Let's speculate for a minute.

As The Sun (yeah, I know) shows, the allegations are that Adoboli lost all that money by taking an illegal punt on the money markets that started, as we've now found out, in 2008, ending in his arrest. So if we're to believe what the Sun says - a risky move in any circumstances - we can guess that Adoboli's panic was a relatively short-term thing. You may not think three years is short-term, but I'm getting to that. Anyway, he knew he'd screwed up massively because of a few decisions, and he knew that the consequences were going to be catastrophic.

But anyone who's ever done any high-stakes gambling knows that that realisation comes after a tipping point. You bet, and you're hopeful. Then you lose, and you bet some more, because you're still hopeful. Then you lose again, and you bet still more, because you're still nursing that last little bit of hope; and then you lose again, and bet the rest of your money, because you're in denial and the hope has turned into delusion. And then, when you realise you've lost all your money, you hit the tipping point: where delusion, finally, becomes panic.

What am I going to do? I need a miracle.

Never mind what I'm going to do - what's my point?

We'll get there. If Kweku Adoboli's alleged illegal activity started in 2008 as the charges suggest, then he'd have been going through that cycle of hope and denial and delusion and panic for three years.

And if what the rest of the commentators are saying is true - that what's been happening around Adoboli is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with our financial and regulatory system - then I think I can take their comparison further. I think I can say that he also represents a microcosm of our own cycles of hope, denial, delusion and panic - cycles that last much, much longer than three years.

And guess what my point is? We're still firmly stuck in the denial part. (Yes, there was panic in August, when the riots happened. But then we went straight back to denial again, which proves that the real panic hasn't really started.)

In fact, I reckon that as a race, as a species, as a highly-evolved blob residing on this planet we've been fortunate enough to colonise and maybe destroy, we just can't cope with the prospect of crisis in the long term. If it's not tangible, and it's a long way away, and its effects and implications are uncertain and unpredictable, we just can't deal with it.

The riots are one example - not that I'll spend too long on them, because everyone else has, but: as we all know, a large (enough) chunk of our British youth, under-educated and under-employed and under-endowed with chances in life, bubbled completely unacknowledged to the surface and stole lots of stuff. Everyone secretly knew it was a long-term problem, a volcano waiting to erupt, but we ignored it. And when it erupted, we hid in our houses, terrified of what we'd ignored. But now everything's all right again, what are we doing? We're pretending social inequality doesn't exist, like we did before. They're just crims, scum, and they can all bog off.

Come on, people. If we're now so bug-eyed that we start making Iain Duncan Smith sound like Polly 'I pretended to be working class once and I know how these people feel' Toynbee, then we really must be in denial. Iain Duncan Smith is not even on the left of the Tory party, let alone on the left in general.

And it doesn't stop there. Climate change. The longest of long-term threats. So long-term that policymakers set carbon emissions targets for the year 46,200,003 in case we haven't been obliterated by an exploding star by then. But we can't even agree on those, because in many countries around the world there are people who come up with reasons why we shouldn't do anything at all about it (including in ours).

Sovereign debt, et cetera. Everyone's in denial about that, but you don't need me to explain it: this does it better than I can.

Public sector strikes: another long-term thing. Public sector pensions are miles away, great big long term investments for a future no-one is at all certain about. And everyone has different estimates of what our liabilities for public sector pensions are, and how they stand in relation to our GDP and our national debt. And it's getting silly. Martin Durkin, the right-wing documentary maker, thinks they've inflated our national debt to nearly five trillion quid. But left-wing bloggers say liabilities will fall as a proportion of GDP. But John Hutton, who wrote the report they're quoting, says they won't if public sector pensions aren't cut. But a cursory glance at that link will show you unions don't think Hutton even understands his own report. But, but, but, but. Mark Serwotka even wrote a letter about it in today's FT. I can't link to that, because it won't let me.

So are unions in denial as well, then? And is the government in denial because it won't consider an alternative?

Is everyone in denial?

What's going on?

And can someone tell me what the hell this is?

Just something to think on for my first blog, anyway. There's no call to action here. But all this does rather feel like we're stuck in some kind of pantomime, where the villain is any one of the dangers listed above, and some of us in the audience are saying "He's in front of you!", and the rest of us are saying what people usually say at pantomimes. "Oh no, he isn't! Get your eyes tested! You're going mad! Have some smelling salts!". That was it.

Sod it, I'm going to end with a grand call to action after all. The moral of the story is: while politics can certainly be a pantomime, it's time we convinced ourselves that our own lives don't fall into the same category.