To many of us, the rise in the popularity of right wing political party, UKIP, has come as no surprise at all. In times of national crisis, including financial crisis, the human brain seems to regress due to the loss of a sense of security - financial security, in this case. Values and behaviours take a step back to a stage in our development before we, as children, felt confident and secure as little individuals, right back to a time when we relied on someone else to meet our basic needs, to do our thinking for us, to keep us safe.
It is generally accepted that the human brain develops from its infantile state, at birth, to relative maturity, by the time the child is three years old; it achieves this largely by internalising the values and behaviours of the community it grows up in. The infant has no real sense of self, as an individual, until it's about two and a half years old, up until this point, it regards itself as an extention of its main care giver, usually its mother.
This mental and emotional development coincides with physical development, so that the sense of self as an individual being in the world has usually been achieved by the time the child has successfully mastered walking, between two and three years for most children. Being in control of the physical environment - being able to get away - brings with it, the power to be self governing to some degree, in ways that just aren't possible before this point in our maturity.
So up until the age of around two and a half, a child's emotional world is considerably less mature too. The developing mind goes through a number of phases, and many of the words psychologists have associated with these stages are in common usage today: we talk about people being egocentric or self-centred, being insecure and having attachment problems, having anally retentive personalities, having oedipal issues - sibling rivalry and so on. There is a general understanding that these conditions, these stages in human development, relate to babies who have not matured, who aren't in control of their actions or thinking in the way that we'd expect of emotionally healthy grown adults.
Politicians of every party know all of this too.
In the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan embarked on a mission to use Freud's theory of child development, specifically to target - in the general public - that level of the psyche where feelings are insecure and the baby is consumed with a fear of annihilation, if its basic needs are not met. Thatcherism, as a model of capitalism, is based soley on this - the drive to get ones own material needs met, Freud's primary Oral Stage, the selfish infant who has no comprehension of the needs of others.
When people feel emotionally insecure and unable to acheive a level of comfort and reassurance from their human relationships (as a very tiny infant achieves comfort from its mother) they are more likely to seek objects to invest emotional comfort in. For the child this takes the form of toys, comfort blankets, dummies and so on; in the adult, it's objects we can buy, which lift our self esteem - on a surface level at any rate. The latest iphone, designer trainers, cars, houses, Jimmy Choo shoes etc (I should write an article about what might be happening emotionally to women who buy those ridiculously high heels they struggle to walk in...) - these are all incredibly emotional purchases, the buyer is looking to feel good about themselves by
feeding themselves with these products, which tend to carry status among their peer group. So Thatcher's objective was very much to tap into people's unconscious sense of insecurity, to encourage her own brand of capitalism and consumerism. If people rely on their purchases to give them a sense of wellbeing, governments can control that sort of society, and essentially keep the masses quiet by making sure those material needs are met. In societies where people are less consumer driven and they get more of their sense of self-worth and security from their emotional relationships, within the family, within their local communities, they are less easy to distract and control with products; they are far more likely to group together to hold a government to account.
This was the Thatcher and Reagan agenda and it was incredibly successful - the 1980's particularly, is a decade we associate with greed and excess, a general decline in moral values and a lessening of compassion. When Tony Blair took power in 1997, people might have expected his focus to be on reestablishing traditional Labour Movement values, such as collectiveness, community and looking out for one another. Of course that wasn't his philosophy at all, he simply carried on from where Thatcher had left off and New Labour's mechanism for controlling the masses (along with George W Bush) was to tap into the paranoid corners of the psyche and to heighten people's fear of terrorism with an endless stream of legislation (and also physical wars) all designed to reduce our sense of national security, again making us easier to control.
In the UK, there are around 160,000 deaths each year from cancer. The number of deaths from domestic terrorism are clearly tiny in comparison. And yet governments invest billions on terrorism prevention - including propaganda to keep reminding us how strong the threat is, but finding a cure for cancer - which will affect one in three of us - is left to a large degree, to charities to try and organise.
Cameron's term in office (and I think it will be limited to just one term) has simply combined Thatcher's obsession with consumerism and Blair's war on terror, with George Osborne's catastrophic economic policy. Living standards have plummeted for all but the 1% of excessively rich families, and yet people continue to spend their wages and benefit cheques on the latest state of the art mobile phone (or those shoes which hamper walking or ridiculously long false nails which hamper manual dexterity.) This, combined with the media agenda to demonise sections of society who are portrayed as a burden on the taxpayer, the physically and mentally disabled, the unemployed, people with large families and the immigrant population, has all fed perfectly into UKIPs hands. The Tories and New Labour created a lack of compassion and paranoia, but offered nothing really to give people a sense of control or even hope. UKIP has come along with the message that they will sort out the thing causing everyone so much misery - the immigration the tabloid press is obsessed with. Farage is inviting all these paranoid people struggling to manage their emotions, to attach themselves to him - He'll take control and he'll make them safe and happy again. Having been discouraged for over thirty years not to think for themselves, not to question authority, of course people flock to him as some sort of answer to their prayers.
Ed Miliband, with his One Nation Labour pledge, is seeking to offer something positive people can attach to again, but, as we see reflected in voting percentages, most people seem to have given up on politics to provide the solution, because politicians have been exposed over the past few years, as largely self-serving, corrupt, out of touch hypocrites.
People are desperately looking for something positive and reassuring to connect with, to attach to and be a part of, but I'm not sure, for the vast majority of us, politics is it.
