Mahmoud Bakir (*)
A father asked his smart young son, who was wise beyond his age, “Why do you mingle with our neighbour, the failed merchant, who is much older than you? He is not a good role model”. The young man, who was in his early twenties and the neighbour in his late forties, answered, “So I know what not to be”.
The value of this neighbour’, or people like him, is that they represent the model we should not follow. This attitude manifests great intellectual insight and would prove useful in many practical fields. Our conventional approach, typically focuses on influential models in any field while ignoring anything less. However, ‘failed models’ are no less important than successful ones, as things are known by their opposites.
The essence of this ideology was employed in the research of Edward Luttwak, an American strategic expert for American military and security institutions, “Give War a Chance”, which resonated greatly among American decision makers. The research suggested, although in a different context, that “we must give war a chance”. This research has become widely known among political strategists in the West and constitutes a landmark in the Western approach to international affairs. The purpose of ‘giving war a chance’ according to Luttwak is that “Violent ethnic conflict is bad, but it is important for both sides to learn the hard way that they can’t defeat the other, and so accept the need to sit down and negotiate a compromise.” In other words, war here is the ‘failed model’ which some people need to go through to realise, practically, that this is not the right option for them.
In both of these cases, between the wise young man and Luttwak is that people would be convinced eventually, regardless of the stark difference between these cases that the former is preventative and not harmful while war has to be experienced in order to realise the destruction and devastation it involves.
This unconventional way of thinking is reminiscent of the so-called Rubbish Theory adopted by Michael Thompson in 1979 in Encounter magazine He said: “In order to truly understand something, you must know its opposite”. Thompson’s motivation in this study, which was within a different framework, was that we often study things of value in society such as knowledge, richness and peace and ignore the opposites of these things which have no value, or are even destructive, such as ignorance, poverty and war. This theory draws our attention to the idea that we usually study things which has a value –constitute a source of power- and ignore the ‘rubbish’ which does not constitute a source of power. This approach necessitates that we consider models that demonstrate the disadvantages rather than focus exclusively on positive models.
Ultimately, the matter, as a whole, is linked to people’s perception, which varies from person to person. That is why perception is a complicated human issue that lies at the heart of psychology; hence the well-known saying “all things come to existence once recognised”. Lack of perception has many implications, including, for example, the so-called ‘Decoy Effect’. This effect is used in marketing to distract people with an undesirable model which acts as a decoy persuading the audience to a make a certain choice. This effect has become part of decision making studies.
Hannah Fry, the British mathematician, cites in her book ‘Mathematics of Love’, an example of how people make choices, applying this in human relations, particularly in the field of love and marriage. There are now studies on how to use this effect the other way round, i.e. for the advantage of the user rather than the producer.
The presence of the ‘opposite’, even if it is slightly evil, can prove very important at times to sustain the vitality of ‘good’. It is this mentality that stands behind the insistence of some political studies in the West that the presence of the Left in their societies is important to keep liberalism alive.
In the same spirit, it would seem that unemployment is an indispensable human and economic necessity in Western societies as its very presence constitutes an indirect threat for any individual not performing their duties well enough. Hence, we could use the line “give unemployment a chance”.
This idea, if well implemented, may even be useful on a personal or societal level; i.e. it may not always be as bad as it seems. Rather, it is made necessary by human nature. However, it must not involve hard or destructive choices or solutions.
In principle, there may be no harm in approaching things, as many things cannot be appreciated without their opposite. The role of this ‘foil’ is to highlight the merits of these things.
One of the practical indirect examples on the use of this type of thinking is the attempt by some mass media in Arab countries which were away from the so-called Arab Spring to demonstrate to their people the extent of destruction in these countries without linking this explicitly to available choices. In other words, they presented destruction (rubbish) in an ‘innocent’ way and left it to the audience to decide what not to be.
By the same token, Donald Trump’s triumph in the American elections, accelerating of the rise of far-right wing in Europe and the spread of populist policies there: the ‘give-them-a-chance’ principle may apply to all of these people to realise how wrong their choices have been. And we shall not wait for long.
Mahmoud Bakir (*):
Is a Syrian mathematician, with specialist interest in promoting the field of mathematics in social sciences and understanding, modelling and finding patterns in human behaviour. His articles and research papers discuss the mathematical modelling of complex social, economic and political issues.
He holds Ph. D, MSc & BSc in Mathematics from University of Sheffield (UK) and Damascus University (Syria). He co-founded the first private university in Syria in 2003; namely “University of Kalamoon” and served as the Vice-Chancellor from 2011 to 2014.